The Laflamme Trio is a chamber ensemble founded in 2013, specialising in the performance of music from the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. Flutist Annie Laflamme, pianist Katarzyna Drogosz, and cellist Jarosław Thiel will perform at the NFM, presenting the recently revived work of Louise Farrenc, a work by the “Lviv Mozart”, as well as compositions by the famous Romantic artist with strong ties to Wrocław – Carl Maria von Weber.

Born in Paris in 1804, Farrenc possessed not only a gift (“a talent rare among women,” Berlioz wrote of her) and determination, but also a great deal of luck. Raised in an artistic family and educated by masters (including Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Antonín Rejcha), she later pursued her passion with the support of her husband. She gave concerts, composed, and co-ran a publishing house. In 1842, she became a lecturer at the Paris Conservatoire. The 19th century saw no other woman hold such a position there. Her Trio in E minor for flute, cello, and piano op. 45 is a testament not only to her distinctive style but also to her excellent grasp of the three instruments’ potential.

Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart was also a student of Hummel. He was Wolfgang Amadeus’s son. His genius father died just over four months after Franz Xaver’s birth. Still young, at the age of seventeen, the young Mozart moved to the area around Lviv – the city around which his life revolved for the next three decades. Hence the nickname “Lviv Mozart”. In the capital of Galicia, he not only composed and gave concerts but also founded a musical society and a choir. The piece presented by the Laflamme Trio was written by Franz Xaver Mozart as the first movement of a sonata commissioned from him in 1808. The misleading title Rondo was given to it by Aloys Fuchs, a 19th-century music scholar who was putting the composer’s legacy in order. Fuchs himself, in the context of this work for flute and piano, once shared the following observation about the flute: “it is extremely delicate, which perfectly suits my rather lyrical nature”. A more distant relative of the son of the Viennese Classicist was the German precursor of Romanticism, Carl Maria von Weber, the author of Der Freischutz and Konstanze Weber’s cousin. The time of writing the Trio in G minor coincided with Der Freischütz. In the finale of this trio, itself a modest chamber work, we do find allusions to the famous Freischütz. The suggestive title of the third movement – ​​The Shepherd’s Complaint – was most probably taken by the composer from one of Wilhelm Ehlers’s songs, written to words by Goethe.