Thibaudet, Batiashvili, Capuçon

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.

Indeed, that yearning character, not least in a seraphic cello solo with star-lit piano accompaniment, may well have been the result of Shostakovich’s intense feelings for Tatyana Glivenko, whom he had recently met while taking the cure at Gaspra in the Crimea. While the Rachmaninoff-like piano outpourings are sometimes tempered by curt cello pizzicatos, both string instruments are willing to indulge this more subjective mood. But there is fury here too, as well as Shostakovich’s inimitable brand of irony. Indeed, like the First Symphony, on which he was working at the same time, this early Trio provides a veritable prospectus of the composer’s talents and tropes.

A Master’s Touch

We turn to the equally prodigious Felix Mendelssohn, but find him in 1845, just two years before his early death. The Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor followed an earlier D-minor work from 1839, though there had also been an abortive trio from Mendelssohn’s very earliest years. The C minor was written at the very height of the composer’s career, with successful performances of St. Paul soon to be followed by the premiere of Elijah, while his popular Violin Concerto had also recently been completed.

Quite unlike those spiritual, soulful works, however, Mendelssohn’s Trio begins in furtive terms, with an imposing crescendo surging up from low down in the piano. This nervousness continues and often threatens to undermine the essentially lyrical core of the music, sounding triumphantly and then tenderly in the relative key of E-flat major. Throughout the first movement, serenity and anxiety duke it out, both becoming more exaggerated as the drama unfolds. And although the former appears to have primacy, a brusque coda refutes that presumption entirely.

Soulfulness returns in the second movement, now firmly couched in the relative major, albeit with a somewhat unsure, hesitant gait. The strings enter and insist upon the meter, which the piano appears happier to adopt in the ensuing interlude. This is the apogee of Mendelssohn’s “Lied ohne Worte” mode, just as the scherzo represents the familiarly chattering brand of music associated with the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As there, this pushes the players to high levels of virtuosity in the context of the Trio. Music in G major then interposes, but provides not so much an alter ego as a brother in arms, driving the dance and the three musicians towards the movement’s close.

If the Trio appears to have turned somewhat chattering in the third movement, the finale restores a sense of seriousness. Here, the enduring influence of the music of the Lutheran Church on Mendelssohn’s output, specifically that of Bach, comes to the fore, with a chorale bursting through the texture during the development section of this sonatarondo form. And rather than the brisk compound-time dance with which the finale begins, it is this more imposing theme, introduced by the piano, that will come to crown the Trio, with an almost symphonic peroration.

“Joie de vivre Expressed by Dance”

Just as Mendelssohn adopts a grand-scale approach to the treatment of the material in the last movement of his Piano Trio, Maurice Ravel imbues the writing of his sole contribution to the genre with an almost orchestral touch. The Trio had long been in the planning—mention is made of a putative work by Ravel to Albert Carré, director of the Opéra Comique in Paris, in 1907—though it was only in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, that Ravel began writing in earnest. The first movement dominated his thoughts during the spring and then he completed the rest of the score over the course of that summer. The delay in reaching the composition stage had largely been due to Ravel’s concerns about balancing the essentially percussive textures of the modern piano and the liquid lines of the violin and cello. Indeed, the latter often recall the intense lyricism of Daphnis et Chloé, Ravel’s 1912 dance project for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

The principal rhythm of the first movement of the Piano Trio was not, however, based in the Arcady of the Greek poet Longus, but in Ravel’s native Basque country, where he would often retire to compose. The region’s characteristic zortziko dance is based on a three–three–two beat combination, giving the movement a stuttering, syncopated quality, before singing forth with more open-hearted, Gallic themes. Nonetheless, the destabilizing rhythm continues throughout the sonata-form movement, with two subjects clearly delineated. The more lyrical second theme recalls the sinuous lines of its counterpart in Ravel’s earlier String Quartet, before the order is inverted in the recapitulation.

The second movement is based not on Basque modes but on a poetic form, pantoum, which originated in Malaysia and was employed by figures such as Verlaine and Baudelaire. It likewise juxtaposes two ideas that are developed over the course of this chattering, dance-like movement, thereby offering a unique approach to the traditional scherzo-trio form. Such innovations are indicative of Ravel’s preference for “the joie de vivre expressed by the dance” over what he termed “Franckist puritanism” (recalling his not entirely happy days at the Paris Conservatoire).

And yet a certain austerity does inform the lines of the aching Passacaille that follows. This movement shows the influence of the work’s dedicatee, André Gedalge, Ravel’s counterpoint teacher in the French capital. But there is nothing “academic” about the movement, with Ravel slowly expanding upon the pensive, skulking theme that is introduced by the piano. Emerging de profundis, the music speaks both of pain and joy, of nostalgia for the past and—in the summer of 1914—of fear for the future. While the piano often offers balm, as well as inspiring climaxes of searing passion, the strings alone sound a more sombre tone. And then the piano returns us to the depths from which this movement first appeared.

Mirroring the initial Modéré, Ravel reverts to sonata form for the finale. Again, an oriental note is sounded here, with the scoring’s orchestral flair coming to the fore. Some of the rhythmic mischievousness of the first movement is also in evidence, though there is a greater sense of unity between the three players, as well as giddy exuberance, with the piano’s strident fanfares bursting through the trilling string. But despite its propulsive nature, a sense of indecision informs the entire movement, indicative of both Ravel’s personal hesitations about how he might complete this long-planned work and, indeed, his trepidation of what lay ahead in the world. The trio’s happy ending may ape a sense of decisiveness—but perhaps more realistic impressions of his mood were to be found in the Forlane of the contemporaneous Le Tombeau de Couperin and the apocalyptic La Valse that was to follow.