The Program
WOLFGANG
AMADEUS MOZART
Piano Trio in B-flat Major, K. 502
About the Composer
The Trio in B-flat Major is the third of the six mature piano trios that Mozart wrote in two batches in 1786 and
1788. The 30-something maestro was the toast of Vienna as both composer and
pianist. This fruitful period saw the creation of his greatest piano concertos,
as well as the last three of the path breaking string quartets dedicated to
Haydn, the “Prague” and “Jupiter” symphonies, and the first of his immortal
operatic collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte, Le nozze di Figaro, which premiered at the Burgtheater on May 1,
1786. A few months earlier, Joseph Haydn had bestowed his blessing on Mozart,
pronouncing him “the greatest composer known to me either in person or by
name.”
About the
Work
Although Mozart was as eager as any composer to expand the market for his
works, the idea of writing down to his audience was anathema to him. He saw no
reason to stint on technical display, especially since he performed most of his
music himself. The score of the B-flat–Major Trio was advertised for sale as
one of three “quite new sonatas for the pianoforte, with the accompaniment of a
violin and violoncello.” In fact, the string parts in K. 502 are fully
emancipated from the strictures of the early–18th-century trio sonata. Mozart
had come a long way from his early sonatas for keyboard and strings, written at
the tender age of eight (they were his first published works), in which the
violin and cello are little more than window dressing, and also from his charmingly lightweight Divertimento for Piano
Trio, K. 254, of 1776. In the second half of 1786, he charted a new and
more egalitarian course in a series of chamber masterpieces, including the
Piano Trio in G Major, K. 496; the “Kegelstatt” Trio, K. 498, for piano,
clarinet, and viola; and, arguably above all, the Piano Trio in B-flat Major,
K. 502.
A Closer
Listen
Mozart’s mastery of the piano-trio medium is
evident in the carefully calibrated colloquy of the opening Allegro. A genial melody in B-flat major is
introduced by the piano, then briefly taken up by the violin before
abruptly veering off into a darkling G-minor netherworld, festooned with
increasingly elaborate keyboard figurations. Despite such artful disguises, the
principal theme never plunges far beneath the surface; even the F-major variant
that launches the movement’s second part, with its distinctive snap rhythm,
bears an unmistakable family resemblance. The slow movement, a radiantly
lyrical Larghetto in E-flat major that might have been plucked from one of
Mozart’s piano concertos, is similarly economical in thematic material and
lucid in texture. The final Allegretto, with its playful skips and turns, takes
us into more chromatic and contrapuntal territory. The music brims with variety
and invention, its whimsically capricious spirit classically disciplined but
never tame or predictable.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
MAURICE RAVEL
Piano Trio in A Minor
About the
Composer
From an early age, Ravel was marked to succeed Debussy as the poet laureate of
French music. The two men shared a poetic
sensibility and a fondness for sensuous,
impressionistic timbres and textures. But while Debussy—who proudly styled
himself musicien français—cast loose
from the moorings of traditional forms and harmonies, Ravel remained a
classicist at heart. Many of his works pay homage to composers and styles of
the past, even as they incorporate ultramodern harmonies and compositional
styles. The Baroque-inspired slow movement of the A-Minor Piano Trio, built on
a repeating melodic and harmonic pattern known as a passacaglia, is a typical
example of his creative recycling.
About the
Work
Ravel produced his lone contribution to the piano-trio genre in a burst of
white-hot inspiration. “I have never worked with more insane, more heroic
intensity,” he wrote to a friend in the late summer of 1914. To another, he
confided that he was “working with the assurance and clarity of a madman.” As
Europe’s armies mobilized for war, Ravel holed up in seclusion at
Saint-Jean-de-Luz, his beloved hideaway on the Basque coast. There, composing
at what for him was a feverish pace, he accomplished “five months’ worth of
work” in five exhilarating weeks. Ravel completed the trio at the end of that
fateful August, then hurried to Bayonne to enlist in the French army, only to
be rejected when examiners ruled that he was four pounds underweight.
Swallowing his disappointment, he volunteered
for service as a hospital orderly instead. In his next work, three limpidly
beautiful songs for unaccompanied chorus modeled on the Renaissance chanson,
both the madness of war and the manic urgency of the Piano Trio seem far away.
A Closer
Listen
In light of its contracted genesis, the Piano Trio’s vibrant intensity is not
surprising. But the character of the music is more elegiac than heroic. It
opens with a billowing, Basque-flavored
melody that glides wistfully above the piano’s gently rocking bass. An
asymmetrical eighth-note pulse—three plus two plus three beats—conveys a sense
of restless instability that carries over into the frenzied, scherzo-like
second movement. (The latter’s title, Pantoum,
refers obscurely to a Malayan verse form that French artists discovered in the
late 19th century.) Next comes a majestic passacaglia, its tender eight-bar
theme rising from the piano’s lowest register. After a series of elegantly
simple variations, the music falls back into the murky deep, but the tranquil
mood is shattered by a scintillating finale, whose shifting meters and
pyrotechnical acrobatics test the virtuosity of all three players.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, Op. 8
About the
Composer
In the fall of 1853, the year he wrote his B-Major Piano Trio, the 20-year-old
Brahms traveled to Düsseldorf to meet the man he admired above all living
composers. Robert Schumann had heard about Brahms from their mutual friend, the
great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim. He welcomed his visitor warmly and
promptly introduced him to his student Albert Dietrich. “Someone is here,”
Schumann said, “of whom we shall one day hear all sorts of wonderful things.”
According to Dietrich, he and Schumann were instantly taken with “the
interesting and unusual-looking musician, who, seemingly hardly more than a boy
in his short gray summer coat, with his high voice and long fair hair, made a
most striking impression. Especially fine were his energetic, characteristic
mouth and the earnest deep gaze in which his gifted nature was clearly revealed.”
About the
Work
Paradoxically, the “first” of Brahms’s three
trios for piano, violin, and cello is
also the last. Notwithstanding its early opus number, the B-Major Trio
dates, in its most familiar form, from the last decade of the composer’s life.
A notoriously harsh self-critic, Brahms had never been satisfied with the
original version of Op. 8, deeming it “wild”
and inferior to his later trios in C major and C minor. When his friend and
publisher, Fritz Simrock, shrewdly acquired the rights to the B-Major Trio and
nine other early works from a competing firm in 1889, the composer seized the
opportunity to revisit the piece he had written 36 years earlier. Brahms was
not content simply to tinker with the trio, however. Instead, he virtually
recomposed it. In reducing the length of the score by nearly a third, he left
only one movement—the scintillating Scherzo—substantially unaltered. Of the
other three movements, he preserved chiefly the principal themes, while
tightening and recasting the musical argument throughout.
A Closer
Listen
A soaring melody, relayed from piano to cello to violin, creates a mood of
expansive lyricism in the opening Allegro con brio. Restless syncopations and
athletic rhythms soon disturb the peace, injecting a note of urgency that is
ultimately dispelled in the tranquil, luminous coda. The sizzling energy of the
B-minor Scherzo is briefly interrupted by a tenderly lilting waltz in the
relative major key. The Adagio, with its hushed, sustained chords in the piano
and the strings spinning their simple, two-part counterpoint, seems to breathe
the air of another world. In the final Allegro, also in B minor, Brahms sets
rippling triplets against propulsive dotted rhythms, driving the movement
toward a somberly exhilarating conclusion.
—Harry Haskell
© 2012 The Carnegie Hall Corporation