"Con brio (Italian). With vivacity, sprightliness, spirit, animation."

The name seems apt for Trio con Brio Copenhagen, performing tomorrow in the seventh and final concert of the Honolulu Chamber Music Series. It is a young ensemble, formed in 1999 in Vienna, reputedly plays with "sparkling joy of life," and does indeed include one musician from Copenhagen.

But the name serves only as an introduction. Even a cursory review reveals an international ensemble in command of a repertoire with maturity and depth.

In eight short years, pianist Jens Elvekjaer from Copenhagen and South Korean sisters violinist Soo-Jin Hong and cellist Soo-Kyung Hong have traveled throughout Europe, the United States and Korea, performing composers such as Haydn, Beethoven, Dvorak, Shostakovich, Ravel, Rachmaninoff and Bloch.

Tomorrow will be Trio con Brio's Honolulu debut. The were recognized at the International Music Competition ARD Munich in 2002 and won the prestigious Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson International Trio Award in 2005.

The program is scheduled to include trios by Haydn, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich, works that cover broad swaths of stylistic territory.

In Haydn's era, the latter half of the 18th century, piano trios were usually more "piano" than "trio," with the cello often doubling the piano's bass line and the violin a literal "second fiddle" to the piano's primacy. Haydn, however, was not a "usual" composer, and although his piano trios remain less known than his string quartets, they are delightful works of typically Haydnesque wit and elegance.

By the mid-19th century, when Mendelssohn composed his two piano trios, the genre had drifted out of the province of amateur musicians into the realm of virtuosos — three independent voices conversing as equals.

For Shostakovich, in the mid-20th century, piano trios afforded a way to compose in a serious, contemporary style without attracting censure.

In Russia, Stalin's Doctrine of Social Realism required composers to write in a style that was accessible not by the musical elite, but by the masses, by The People. Those who did not conform were publically censured and sometimes arrested, their careers over.

In response, Shostakovich developed almost a schizophrenia in his music, composing on multiple levels of meaning. Musicians continue to debate the "real" meaning of his works and how to interpret them. Consequently, every performance presents another interpretation and new insights.

The work Trio con Brio plans to perform, Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2, was completed near the end of World War II, in the autumn of 1944. During that year, his most promising student, a young Jewish composer named Benjamin Fleischmann, was killed in action, and his closest friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, died of a heart attack. Shostakovich dedicated the work to Sollertinsky and, for the first time, incorporated a theme he believed to be Jewish, possibly in tribute to Fleischmann.

One critic stated that "there is a doom and gloom about (the trios) that almost transcends human feeling," and called Trio No. 2 "a mournful and harrow-ing piece." This is not a work of gentle delights, but one that reaches deep into one's soul, exploring issues of life and death in a way that only music can.

Trio con Brio will traverse vast distances tomorrow, from Haydn to Shostakovich, from Classic through Romantic to 20th Century, from peace to war and elegant discourse to wrenching soul-searching.