Matthew Hindson’s piano trio Rush opened the 2026 ChamberFest Cleveland on 10 June, performed by pianist Evren Ozell, violinist Gabrielle Després, and cellist Raman Ramakrishnan. The work appeared as part of the ‘Global Fanfare’ opening concert, celebrating a composer from each continent. The piece will appear again at ChamberFest West – the counterpart Festival in Calgary, run by the same artistic team – on 14 July, where it makes its Canadian debut, performed by David McCarroll, Brook Speltz, Zoltán Fejérvári.
The first…came to a breathless conclusion…an invigorating piece that begins with a catchy ostinato in the piano and cello…Downright fun, Rush brought the first half of the concert to a satisfying close.
ClevelandClassical.com (Daniel Hathaway) 17 June 2026
Rush, as with many of Hindson’s works, draws inspiration from several musical genres. One of its starting points is the quicksilver virtuosity of the finale of Mendelssohn’s String Octet, which Hindson had in mind when creating the work’s original guitar quintet version in 1999, for the Goldner String Quartet and Slava Grigoryan.
Another influence is that of techno, whose music has made a deep impression on Hindson’s style (in work’s such as Speed and The Rave and the Nightingale, which imagines Franz Schubert in the DJ booth). Consequently, the work accelerates precipitously across its frenetic 9-minute span, and is charged with catchy melodic fragments and vibrant rhythmic motifs. The piano trio version, created in 2015 for the Benaud Trio, alternates effervescent and transparent writing, with the upper registers of the instruments dominant, with denser, more grungy, machinic passages, as it races to its conclusion.