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We suggest works to explore after Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2
Composed when he was still in his teens, Shostakovich’s First Piano Trio is a very different beast from his Second. The composer had fallen head-over-heels for a girl called Tatyana Glivenko at the time and the work – originally called Poème – has a highly romantic central section. There are, though, also elements of the chromaticism and angularity that would define his later output (Beaux Arts Trio Warner 2564625142).
Shostakovich’s pupil Georgy Sviridov wrote his Piano Trio in A minor during the height of the Siege of Leningrad in World War II, and it would go on to win the Stalin Prize in 1946. An elegiac opening movement – punctuated by aggressive outbursts – is followed by a spiky, frantic Scherzo that has the hallmarks of Sviridov’s teacher written all over it, a funeral march and, finally, an Idyll that offers some sort of uneasy repose. Large-scale and dramatic, it is well worth exploring (Beethoven Trio Bonn Avi Music AVI8553375).
Having fled his native Poland at the outset of World War II, Mieczys¯aw Weinberg settled in Moscow in 1943, on Shostakovich’s advice. Shortly after, he
Sviridov’s elegiac opening movement is followed by a spiky, frantic Scherzo
completed his Piano Trio, Op. 24, a work whose confidently upbeat opening chords bely the drama that is to follow, not least in the fraught Toccata – Allegro second movement. Things briefly reach fever pitch, too, in the Allegro moderato finale before this most distinctive of trios evaporates slowly into stillness (Kolja Blacher (violin), Johannes Moser (cello), Elisaveta Blumina (piano) CPO 777 8042).
Alfred Schnittke’s 1992 Trio for
Violin, Cello and Piano is, in fact, an arrangement of his String Trio, written in 1985 to mark the centenary of Berg’s birth.
The overall mood of the work’s two movements is perhaps described as ‘restrained bleakness’, though there are occasional, if admittedly rare, glimpses of good humour there too (Kempf Trio BIS BISSACD1482).
Also dating from 1985 is P¯eteris Vasks’s Episodi e canto perpetuo for piano trio. Dedicated to Messiaen, Vasks’s eightmovement piece reveals the often disconsolate outlook of a Latvian composer working under the still-repressive regime of the Soviet Union (Trio Palladio Ondine ODE13432).