Trio leaves you with that lighter than AYR feeling
Look at the following three titles, and see if you can come up with an overarching theme. “Ghost Trio.” “Solstice Songs.” “Piano Trio no. 2 in C.” Coming up as empty as the last bus to Balaclava?
Well, fret not, because cellist Rachel Mercer, artistic director of the 5 at the First Chamber Music Series and the “R” in the AYR Trio, which will be playing those three pieces this Saturday at 3 p.m. in First Unitarian, could only come up with an impromptu theme for AYR’s concert, generically titled, “Piano Trio Masters.”
“There isn’t exactly a theme unless you call it ‘My Personal Favourites’ or just ‘Basically Things that I Haven’t Played in a While or That I Always Wanted to Play,’” said Mercer over the phone last week from Oberursel, just outside of Frankfurt, Germany, where she and violinist Yehonatan Berick (the “Y” in the AYR Trio) were visiting her sister, Akemi, a violinist in the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.
Surprisingly, Mercer has never played Beethoven’s “Piano Trio in D” op. 70 no. 1, the so-called “Ghost Trio,” though that doesn’t hold true for Berick or pianist Angela Park — yup, the “A” in AYR.
“My Beethoven trio repertoire is very small and there’s a lot of them,” said Mercer. “So that is one obviously I wanted to do.”
Now, the causal listener may hear the violin’s and cello’s first notes followed by the piano’s mournful response at the beginning of the trio’s slow second movement and think, “Hmm, pretty eerie. Maybe that’s why Beethoven nicknamed it the ‘Ghost’?”
However, that “Ghost” moniker doesn’t stem from Beethoven, but his piano student Carl Czerny who, in 1842, long after Beethoven’s death, said that the second movement reminded him of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. And Czerny wasn’t all that far off the mark. The words “Macbett” and “Ende” can be found on Beethoven’s sketches for the movement. And from his entries in his notebook at the time, it seems that Beethoven was contemplating writing an opera on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” with the playwright Heinrich von Collin.
But musically speaking, what’s more important was the manner in which Beethoven was transforming piano trio literature.
“What Beethoven does is he also gives much more independence to the two other instruments, more than Mozart did,” said Berick.
And much more than Haydn, who often had the cello double the piano’s bass line.
Mercer has played a few works by Canadian composer Andrew Staniland, but never his “Solstice Songs” from 2011, a work commissioned, premièred, and recorded by the Gryphon Trio.
“There are no words in ‘Solstice Songs,’” writes Staniland in his program notes. “However, the writing is song-like in that it is lyrical in style. It is the poetry of sound. ‘Solstice Songs’ unfolds in three defined sections. The first movement is lyrical in nature, with aural depictions of ancient monuments aligned to solar events. The second is a dark and atmospheric interlude, exploring distant thunder and
unseen mechanics. The third features oscillation between sections of layered nocturnal melody and a driving perpetuum mobile.”
While Mercer and her trio mates enjoy presenting Canadian repertoire such as the Staniland, they also revel in standard rep, be it the Beethoven or the concert closer, Brahms’s “Piano Trio no. 2 in C” op. 87.
“Out of the three, I think it (the Brahms) is probably my favourite,” mused Mercer, who places AYR squarely in the Brahms-lovers camp.
“I don’t think it’s going to be challenging for the audience,” said Berick of the Brahms.
“It’s going to be very rewarding. Usually, people feel great at the end of that piece. They feel light on their feet.”