Wu Han, piano
Arnaud Sussmann, violin
David Finckel, cello

Joseph Haydn
Trio in E major for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Hob. XV:28
In the field of chamber music, Haydn is most renowned as the father of the string quartet medium, but he was nearly as prolific a composer of piano trios. More than 40 of them span four decades of his career, from the 1760s to the late 1790s. This afternoon, we will hear one of the final three, probably composed in 1796 shortly after Haydn had returned from his second triumphant period in London. They were all written for Therese Jansen, the wife of the musical engraver Bartolozzi, who must have been a remarkable pianist because Haydn also composed his last three piano sonatas for her.

Indeed, the piano is the star instrument in these trios, for Haydn conceived of the piano trio as being primarily a solo vehicle for the pianist, with the violinist only a secondary soloist and the cellist an accompanist chiefly reinforcing the piano’s left-hand part. In his landmark book The Classical Style, Charles Rosen describes Haydn’s piano trios as being “along with the Mozart concertos the most brilliant piano works before Beethoven.”

Each of these three trios shows Haydn at his experimental best in terms of rhythmic play, harmonic daring, and flexible formal construction. However, the Trio in E major, Hob. XV:28 is the most astonishing of them all, as Haydn breaks the Classical models of how far afield a tonic key is permitted to wander, as well as what formal structure should be used for each movement. It is a work that never ceases to astonish—and to delight.

The first movement’s opening sonorities come as a total surprise. Like a pointillistic pen-and-ink sketch, the piano etches in staccato the naive principal theme, while violin and cello playing in pizzicato intensify each stroke. Using another image, Robert Philip describes it as resembling “a folksong in which the singer accompanies herself on the harp.” The piano then takes over to transform the theme into a flowing rhapsody, embellished with ornaments and chromaticism. As was often the case, Haydn needed no second theme, but aided by the violin’s soaring countermelody carries this theme through various modulations to an adventurous development section. Its most shocking feature is a lurch to the distant key of A-flat major for a forceful presentation of the principal theme, now enthusiastically joined by the strings. From the starkness of its opening, this music has steadily evolved into a witty display of piano brilliance.

In E minor, the Allegretto second movement also seizes our immediate attention with a mournful eighth-note pattern played by all the instruments in unison. Paying homage to J.S. Bach, Haydn adopts this as a passacaglia pattern repeating, with minor modifications, throughout the entire movement. Undergirded by this pattern in her left hand, the pianist launches a glorious cantabile melody, containing both delicate Baroque ornamentation and dramatic leaps and plunges. Later, violin and cello enter to take over the passacaglia pattern. The movement’s peak is achieved in a passage of lavish counterpoint, with the passacaglia pattern rising on top in the violin and the pianist’s right hand while the dramatic melodic theme descends to the cello and piano’s left hand.

Back in E major, the insouciant finale is filled with tricks, notably in its rhythmically offbeat theme that meanders on beyond where it should rightfully stop. More surprises come in the middle section in E minor, where the violin tears into a melodramatic episode accompanied by piano turbulence; this eventually veers off course to another distant key: E-flat minor. The E-major theme ultimately comes to the rescue, but not without a few more wayward incidents.
—Janet E. Bedell

Dmitri Shostakovich
Trio in E minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 67
Shostakovich dedicated his Second Piano Trio to the memory of Ivan Sollertinsky, a prominent Russian music critic and cultural commentator, as well as one of the composer’s closest friends and staunchest supporters. Shostakovich biographer Solomon Volkov writes, “His legendary erudition… made Sollertinsky an irreplaceable advisor and mentor. The composer could speak frankly to him about everything under the sun, from sex to Schoenberg.” Shostakovich regarded Sollertinsky with devoted affection, once writing to his friend: “I consider you the only musician, and, besides that, a personal friend, and in any situation of life I will always and in every way support you.” Such a promise of support was not an insignificant one during Stalin’s reign: any prominent cultural figures who displeased the dictator were marked men, as were all whose who allied themselves with them.

This, in fact, would be Sollertinsky’s fate for championing Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. With its unflinching perspective on sexuality and violence combined with the poised craftsmanship of Shostakovich’s score, Lady Macbeth was quickly hailed as a classic of Russian opera. It received its premiere in 1934 and met with universal acclaim. Two years later, however, Stalin attended a performance of the opera and, scandalized by both the subject matter and Shostakovich’s bold score, walked out before the final act. Two days later, a now-legendary editorial appeared in Pravda, the national newspaper and unofficial Stalinist mouthpiece, entitled “Muddle Instead of Music.” The editorial, which offered a scathing attack on Shostakovich’s opera, ran unsigned but was understood to represent the official view of the Communist Party; many, including Shostakovich, suspected with good reason that Stalin authored the editorial himself.

Despite his denunciation of Lady Macbeth, Stalin nevertheless recognized the importance of the arts to the cultivation of a powerful Russian civilization as well as Shostakovich’s immense value to Russia’s cultural life. For this reason, Shostakovich—though never safe—was ultimately spared the worst of Stalin’s wrath. Sollertinsky, however, did not hold the same value for Stalin, and became a public scapegoat. For supporting Lady Macbeth, Sollertinsky was labeled by Pravda as a “defender of bourgeois perversion in music” and as an “idealogue of the movement that crippled Shostakovich’s music.” Around this time, Shostakovich received a recommendation on Stalin’s behalf from the chairman of the Committee on Arts Affairs that he “free himself from the influence of some servile critics, like Sollertinksy, who promote the worst of his writing.”

While mounting pressure made complete and open support of Sollertinsky impossible, Shostakovich nevertheless remained loyal to his friend. After the critic died suddenly from a heart spasm in February 1944, Shostakovich commemorated their bond with his Piano Trio in E minor. In 1946, somewhat ironically, the work received the prestigious Stalin Prize, an honor awarded by the government each year to what the Communist Party deemed seminal works of Russian art.

The work features one of chamber music’s most memorable beginnings: Shostakovich sets the opening theme (which soon evolves into the subject of a fugue), not where it would sit comfortably in the violin’s alto register, but with haunting artificial harmonics in the cello. Following a signature Shostakovich scherzo—combining wit, ferocity, and daring virtuosity—comes the devastating Largo, on whose loud, fateful, introductory chords the spirit of the piece pivots dramatically. The finale opens with a theme demonstrating a politically dangerous solidarity with the Jewish community in the face of the Soviet regime. This theme would reappear in Shostakovich’s semi-autobiographical String Quartet No. 8, which the composer dedicated “to the victims of fascism and war.”
—Patrick Castillo

Felix Mendelssohn
Trio in C minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 66
Mendelssohn completed this, the second of his two piano trios, in 1845, six years after the first. Though he presented the work as a birthday present to his sister Fanny, the published score bears a dedication to Mendelssohn’s friend and colleague Louis Spohr. In addition to his compositional renown, Spohr was known as one of the leading violinists of the day and took part himself in numerous performances this composition with the composer at the piano.

Like its elder sibling, this trio exudes Romantic pathos immediately from its opening strains. A serpentine piano melody rises to a forceful cadence, only to return to a nervous whisper in the strings. Mendelssohn extends this theme to another upward arching musical idea in the violin and cello; a frenzy of sixteenth notes in the piano underneath inverts the contour of the theme, quietly sinking lower and lower. The movement’s second theme, introduced by the violin, could be the doppelganger of the first: the heroic counterpart to the tortured opening measures.

The Andante espressivo, analogous to the Andante movement of the Op. 49 trio, is a vintage Lied ohne worte (song without words): this music encapsulates Romanticism at its most deeply heartfelt. Of the quicksilver third movement, Mendelssohn admitted that the perilously fast tempo might be “a trifle nasty to play.”

Among the compelling narrative threads of Mendelssohn’s life and legacy is his complicated relationship with religion. He was born into a prominent Jewish family—his grandfather was the distinguished Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn—but Felix’s father, Abraham, insisted that the family convert to Christianity as a means of assimilating into contemporary German society. The hyphenated surname often used in reference to the composer, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, was likewise insisted upon by Abraham Mendelssohn, on the premise that “there can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius.”

Though it does not bear any explicit program, the Op. 66 finale might nevertheless be heard to reflect somewhat the nuanced role that religion played in Mendelssohn’s life and artistry. The movement begins with a dance-like theme whose shape and articulation (and opening melodic interval of a minor ninth) suggest Jewish folk music. Later in the movement, Mendelssohn unexpectedly introduces the Lutheran hymn “Gelobet seist Du, Jesu Christ.” While the piano offers the hymn, the strings play fragments of the opening theme. Music scholar Robert Philip has likened this juxtaposition to “two diminutive figures speaking in hushed tones as they enter a great cathedral.” Extending this juxtaposition of musical ideas—indeed, ultimately reconciling the two—the movement escalates to an ecstatic climax. A radiantly transfigured version of the opening dance-like melody gets the last word, propelling the trio to a riveting final cadence.
—Patrick Castillo