Musical Love at First Sight

Nicky Swett talks with mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron and pianist Gloria Chien about Trio Afiori, the group they recently formed together with clarinetist Anthony McGill, and about the repertoire they present on the first Sonic Spectrum concert of CMS’s 2025–26 season.

Nicky Swett: Your new group includes voice, clarinet, and piano—quite an atypical trio formation. How did the three of you come together as an ensemble?

Fleur Barron: We started playing together because Anthony and I were both friends and collaborators with Gloria. Anthony and I had not met before, but we had been fangirling about each other to Gloria during the pandemic. She said, “I wonder if there’s some way we could put something together,” and we both said yes. Gloria is co-artistic director of a series called String Theory, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, so we did one concert there. We spent a few days rehearsing and living together in an Airbnb in Chattanooga, and it was like musical love at first sight. We would have these 2:00 am business meetings about how we should really officialize this and figuring out what the repertoire would be. It was just a mutual thing that we all wanted to do.

NS: Where did the name “Trio Afiori” come from?

FB: At first we were calling ourselves “McFleuria” for fun. Often if you don't have a name, you just go by the performer's last names, but that was just so wordy! When we were exploring names, at first we were coming up with things that sounded progressive or avant-garde, but they were not easy to pronounce, and they were also kind of pretentious. Gloria said, “I think we should just keep it simple and personal.” McFleuria was personal, and at one point we actually wanted to call ourselves that, but my agent said, “Absolutely not! That is not a serious, public-facing name.” So we came up with something that sounds slightly more elegant. “Afiori” is just letters and meanings from all of our names. My name is Fleur, and in Italian, Fiore means flower. A is for Anthony, and “ori” is from Gloria.

NS: You’ve been commissioning quite a bit of new music for the group, including Angels by Valerie Coleman, which will have its world premiere on the upcoming Sonic Spectrum concert. How did you wind up working with her?

Gloria Chien: Valerie, who is also a flutist, had a trio called Umama Womama together with harpist Han Lash and violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama. They came to Portland for Chamber Music Northwest maybe three summers ago, and then when she left, she told me her dream projects, one of which was actually to write for Anthony, me, and a singer! So after the trio knew we'd liked each other and would like to work together, I reached out to Valerie and said, “Hey, we have this wonderful ensemble!”

NS: Can you tell me a bit about the piece that Valerie wrote for you?

GC: It's very of this time. Her heart is heavy right now with everything that is going on in the United States and the world, as we all are. The first movement, New Colossus, is about the current state of affairs. There’s also a nod to the 250th anniversary of America. It features text from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, and the title of the whole piece, Angels, comes from the famous last line. [“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”] The second movement is a virtuosic piece for just the clarinet and piano. It represents the trauma, the pain, the suffering—all of those things. Then the final movement is a prayer. Fleur’s part actually doesn't have any syllables, so she hums through it. There are seven sections, and each section is a prayer cycle for a specific thing: healing; injustice against women; children; race; the Amazon rainforest; peace; and climate. It also includes a nod to Anthony’s Two Knees video, which he made during the pandemic after the murder of George Floyd. The video is in black and white, and he plays the end of America the Beautiful, but ends in a minor key, and then he kneels down. It was quite inspirational to many people at the time. Valerie’s piece is a call for unity and for bringing everyone together through the love we share for music, through family, through humanity. We’re all feeling it and I think it will be a very powerful piece.

FB: It has this fundamentally uplifting energy that Valerie is always drawn to in her music. I think that is something that’s very anchoring for this program.

N.S.: This Sonic Spectrum concert includes a couple of songs for voice and piano, and also one work for clarinet and piano, Four Pieces in Bird Shape by Takashi Yoshimatsu. Gloria, what do you enjoy about playing piano-clarinet repertoire?

GC: I love playing with singers because they breathe and I feel like my hands breathe at the same time in response. I love clarinet because it’s as close to singers as you can get! Anthony was in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for a decade and he’s listened to singers so much. In a way, he plays the most beautifully, the most lyrically, but he can also be so virtuousic and fiery and powerful. Also, the clarinet has a huge dynamic range. They can be very soft and they can be very loud, and so when I play with clarinet I can play around with those kinds of extremes.

NS: What brings together the two songs that we hear on this program?

GC: My role with singers is often about creating colors. In Chen Yi’s Bright Moonlight and Huang Ruo’s Fisherman’s Sonnet, my job is very much to create the atmosphere. I’m the moonlight or I’m the water or I’m the boat, and Fleur is the protagonist.

FB: This Huang Ruo is a piece I’ve done a lot and I really love it. A lot of his vocal writing is in Chinese, which I love because I grew up in Hong Kong and I’m half Chinese. The song is influenced by Kunqu opera, which is a regional variant of Peking opera, and it has a slightly improvisatory feel. I can choose my own ornaments like they would in Kunqu or Peking opera. It’s a very simple, beautiful poem about a fisherman who’s on the water seeing the sunrise and the beauty and the mysticism of that. You really hear the water in the piano part and also the little pings of sun rays bouncing off the water. Chen Yi’s Bright Moonlight is a setting of her own words. She told me that she wrote this song when she was on a plane shortly after she’d emigrated to the United States and she was really missing China. This text emerged out of that nostalgia. It is about how the moon is something that you see no matter where you are in the world and something that makes you feel connected to a place where you’re not. Her piece is a Western art song in its form, but it also sounds distinctly Chinese in a certain way. The harmonies connect it to Huang Ruo. I can hear the Chineseness of these songs in a way that makes me feel nostalgic in a good way.

NS: The program closes with Kian Ravaei’s Gulistan, a piece that started its life for a different instrumentation. What does the arrangement of it that you present on this concert add to the original?

GC: Kian Ravei’s Gulistan was written for Fleur and commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest, and it was originally for cello, mezzo, and piano. For our first Trio Afiori concerts, we asked him if he could transcribe it for clarinet, mezzo, and piano, and the piece quickly became a centerpiece for our programs.

FB: It’s sung in Farsi, Azerbaijani, and English, and it’s based on Persian, Azerbaijani, American, and English folk songs. It’s music that feels nostalgic and home-like and that’s also easy to connect to for the performers, so it can feel personal even if it’s a culture that is not your own. The first song has all four of the musical idioms alternating. He takes strains of folk music and the four languages and he layers them in various ways. I’ll have a section where I’m singing the text of an English folk song and then there’ll be a page where there’s no voice, but folk sounds from a different tradition. In the first movement, all of the texts have to do with flowers and the music is more soulful. Then the second song is extremely joyful. It works really well with clarinet! There’s a lot of fast stuff. On cello, you’ve got to move a lot more to get around the instrument, so it can only go so quickly. It’s very exciting with clarinet, which can go faster, especially with Anthony’s virtuoso abilities. It does feel like the piece is completely different with this set of instruments!

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a program annotator and regular editorial contributor at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.