Composer Paul Richards‘s Destination Unknown — his first piano trio — receives its world premiere at Friday Musicale, performed by the three University of Florida colleagues for whom it was written: violinist Janna Lower, cellist Steven Thomas, and pianist Jasmin Arakawa. Richards, Research Foundation Professor and head of composition at UF, whose music has been heard on six continents and whose commissions include the Jacksonville Symphony, the Florida Orchestra, and the Boston Brass, joins the players onstage to introduce the twenty-five-minute work and speak briefly about how it came to be.

The performers bring international careers to the premiere. Lower, Professor of Violin and head of the strings area at UF and previously artist teacher at Rice University’s Shepherd School, has appeared as recitalist, soloist, and concertmaster across Europe and the Americas. Thomas, a top prizewinner in the Villa-Lobos and Bach international cello competitions, has performed on four continents and chaired both the string and chamber music departments at the Hartt School. Arakawa, a graduate of the Tokyo University of the Arts and director of the UF International Piano Festival, has been heard at Carnegie Hall, Salle Gaveau in Paris, and in broadcasts on the BBC and Radio France.

The new work is joined by two very different companions. Brahms’s Piano Trio in B Major was his own first essay in the form — written at twenty, then torn apart and rebuilt by a composer of fifty-six, and beloved for the sweep of its opening melody. And Johan Halvorsen’s 1894 Passacaglia, the Norwegian violinist-composer’s free and fiendishly virtuosic reworking of a movement from Handel’s G-minor keyboard suite, gives Lower and Thomas the stage to themselves.

Admission: $35 general, $20 Friday Musicale members, and $15 for students with valid ID. Doors open thirty minutes before the performance.

Founded in 1890, Friday Musicale is one of the South’s longest-running music organizations, gathering Jacksonville around live music for more than 135 years.

Note: This performance sponsored by the generous support of Sharon Scholl. Friday’s concert will offer free admission to a slightly shorter program (exact works TBD).