Tuesday September 15, 2009

Friends of Chamber Music
Trio con Brio Copenhagen
Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Trio in D major, Op.70 No. 1 (Ghost)
Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op.67 (4/23/08)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Piano Trio No. 4 in D major,
Op.70 No. 1 (Ghost)
I. Allegro vivace con brio
II. Largo assai et espressivo
III. Presto

During the fall of 1808 Beethoven was staying with his friend Countess Maria von Erdödy. The two Opus 70 piano trios, composed at this time, were dedicated to her. The works were first played at a private recital in her salon that Christmas. Beethoven himself played the piano part, with violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh and cellist Joseph Linke.
Beethoven referred to the Countess as his ``father confessor'' because of her advice on various matters. Johann Reichardt described her as a ``very beautiful, fine little woman who from her first confinement was afflicted with an incurable disease which for ten years has kept her in bed for all but two to three months...whose sole entertainment was found in music, who plays even Beethoven's pieces right well...yet is so merry and friendly and good .'' She is said to have paid Beethoven's servants to stay with him.
After a quarrel with the Countess in 1809, Beethoven asked his publisher to change the dedication to Archduke Rudolph, one of Beethoven's patrons. They were eventually reconciled, but the dedication to the Archduke remained. The Countess later received the dedication to Beethoven's last two cello sonatas, Op.102.
Beethoven had begun an opera on Heinrich von Collin's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, but left it unfinished after second act ``because it threatened to become too gloomy,'' according to an early biographer. His music for the opening scene of the witches is said to have found its way into the middle movement of the D major trio, especially a repeated motive that John N. Burk describes as ``a weird figure which might be described as a soulless cry..''
Arthur Berger says the overall structure of the D major trio resembles an arch shape. ``The two outside movements are lucid and direct in style,'' he writes, ``the high point of the trio is the middle movement, the foreboding Largo.'' Maynard Solomon agrees. The work, he writes, ``has two unproblematic and relaxed movements flanking a powerful pre-Romantic Largo, whose atmospheric tremolo effects and sudden dynamic contrasts gave rise to the work's nickname.'' He regards the second trio as ``one of the masterpieces of the middle period,'' a delicate balance ``between the traditional Viennese style and Beethoven's own most mature style.''

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Opus 67
I. Andante
II. Allegro con brio
III. Largo
IV. Allegretto

On February 11, 1944, Ivan Sollertinsky, a musicologist and staff lecturer for the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, died. Four days later, in memory of ``my closest and dearest friend,'' Shostakovich began his second piano trio, dedicated to Sollertinsky. ``I owe all my education to him,'' said the composer. ``It will be unbelievably hard for me to live without him.''
In 1944 the Russian people were learning of the Nazi atrocities at Treblinka and other death camps. The news inescapably affected the content of the trio, which Shostakovich completed on August 13, 1944 at the Composers' Collective Farm near Ivanovo, northeast of Moscow.
The work was introduced on November 9, 1944 at the Composers' Club in Moscow. Shostakovich played the piano part, with two members of the Beethoven Quartet, violinist Dmitri Tsiganov and cellist Serge Shirinsky.
In his book Not by Music Alone, Rostislav Dubinsky, the violinist of the Borodin Trio, describes the first performance: ``The music left a devastating impression. People cried openly. The last, the `Jewish Part' of the Trio, by popular acclaim had to be repeated. An embarrassed, nervous Shostakovich repeatedly came onto the stage and bowed awkwardly....After the first performance it was forbidden to play the Trio. Nobody was surprised. The Trio not only expressed music, something else was there, as if it were a truthful interpretation of our reality.''
The Trio has no ``official'' program. However, Dubinsky's thirty-year friendship with the composer emboldens him to comment. ``Its very beginning,'' he writes, ``sounds like an anxious premonition of misfortune. We feel how it overwhelms us without mercy and eventually in the second part of the Scherzo (second movement) there is a burst of fiendish, destructive dance of death. In the third part, the Passacaglia, one hears bloodcurdling piano chords. Is it not the sound of a hammer on a piece of railway line which tells the prisoners of the concentration camp, that `One more day in the life Ivan Denisovich' has started? While this evil sound resounds across the hall as if in a concentration camp, the violin and cello weep, rather pray, for the people who perished.''
In the finale, ``the Jewish motif in it reaches the height of a powerful angry protest....When it seems that all means of expression are exhausted the violin and cello unexpectedly become mute. Then in deathly agony a wail escapes from a throat strangled by an iron hand. The Trio ends with the initial Jewish motif disappearing into a state of non-existence like a question mark about the fate of the whole nation.''