A classical music trio from Switzerland comprising cellist Domitille Coppey, pianist Jessie Vergéres and violinist Timothée Coppey thrilled the audience during a recital on July 18 at The Dharmawangsa in South Jakarta with a strongly built set list.

The trio started the program with a song cycle titled “Trio in A Major” from Russian composer Vissarion Shebalin, who lived between 1902 and 1963.

The different tempos of the song cycle — moderato, allegro assai and largo — evoked in listeners a life-affirming sentiment. The three players showcased their full strength here, presenting a song cycle that, in a synesthetic perception, created an image of a train going up and down a hill in one beautiful journey through its changing tempos.

The composition itself is brilliant, full of joy and optimistic despite the composer’s tragic life.

“During the Soviet regime, he fell victim to the 1943 Soviet Union purge and had fallen into obscurity since then,” Domitille explained.

Then the hall became melancholic with a piece called “Prayer” from Ernest Bloch, a Swiss Jewish composer who lived during the baroque period of 1880 to 1959. The composition’s predominant motif is played in the lower registers of the cello, which makes the piece even more haunting and chilling.

Domitille played the somber melody — which sometimes transitions into a prayer-like solemnity evoking devotion.

In this piece, the late composer seems to evoke a sense of both dread and faith — two elements that are salient and interlocked in the Jewish collective memory, as persecution has been a major part of Jewish history.

Having lived through the Holocaust, which occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, overlapping with World War II, Bloch truly understood the horrors of the systematic genocide of Jews across Europe by Nazi Germany and how faith had become their sole key to survival during a time of great brutality, evoking his comprehension in one powerful musical piece.

Whereas through “Prayer”, Bloch seemed to want to go into the light of life but had not quite reached his destination yet, the piece that followed his composition, “Le Grand Tango” by Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla, who lived from 1921 to 1992, once again reminded us of the light that would eventually appear at the end of a long dark tunnel.

True to the spirit of tango itself, the piece truly celebrates human life and the vitality that animates it — no matter what trials one has to go through in one’s life — with upbeat music. The audience nodding their heads and moving their hands and feet rhythmically along to the music was a reminder at the end of a long day that life, after all is said and done, is worth living.

Like all successful classical performers in the world, that evening the Swiss trio succeeded in taking its audience to emotional highs and lows — celebrating all facets of the human experience — in one powerful recital.

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