Trio Gaia: Grant Houston, Yi-Mei Templeman, Ariel Mo

Owen first encountered Trio Gaia as students at Yale's Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and was immediately bowled over by their commitment and expressivity. Now, after prize wins on three continents and appearances from Osaka to Carnegie Hall, they make their San Francisco debut with a program they call Between Worlds — an exploration of how distance and displacement can reshape, not erase, a musical identity. Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite opens the afternoon: a composer in exile reimagining the past into something unmistakably his own. Two newer works follow — Andrea Casarrubios's Luz Azul and An-Lun Huang's Piano Trio No. 2 — both searching for cross-cultural identity through music that holds loss and gratitude at the same time. After intermission, Dvořák's Piano Trio in F minor brings everything home: written on the cusp of his departure for America, it is the sound of a composer carrying his roots with him into the unknown. New England Conservatory's most recent graduate piano trio in residence, Trio Gaia believes that chamber music is a model for the world — and this program proves it.