A Trio of Trios Shostakovich—Mendelssohn—Ravel
Gavin Plumley
The piano trio came of age in the late Classical period. As the cello was released from its Baroque role of providing harmonic support, so too was the keyboard instrument as mere continuo. Equanimity was therefore part and parcel of the genre as it entered its maturity, though the keyboard often took the lead, thanks to pianist-composers such as Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms—and, beyond the German-speaking world, Franck and Tchaikovsky. This was also a result of the piano’s technological advances and the ready availability of the instrument in the bourgeois-family home. Perhaps no composer better represents that middle-class music-making than Mendelssohn, whose Piano Trio in C minor Op. 66 stands at the heart of this evening’s program. But while the piano trio’s primacy faded somewhat by the 20th century, there remained keen adherents, including Rachmaninoff, who continued the “chamber concerto” style of trio, and tonight’s examples: Ravel and Shostakovich. Youthful Outpourings Published as his Op. 8, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 1 in C minor dates from 1923, when the composer was in his late teens. A pupil at the Leningrad Conservatory, he was a promising pianist, steeped in the music of Bach, as well as that of compatriots, including Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and more forward-thinking figures such as Hindemith and Bartók. All of these forces come into play in this early Trio, lasting just under 15 minutes. Its opening is characteristic of the kind of “fractured” Romanticism that would reappear throughout Shostakovich’s output, with a cantabile elegy—the work was originally entitled Poème— that bursts forth in restive counterpoint. Despite the disparities in its presentation, however, all the music is derived from the work’s initial, longing gestures. 13
