W t•g m.ore H a ll Manager: William Lyne Lessees: The Arts Council of Great Britain
French Series
Wednesday 13 June 1984 at 7.30 pm
Beaux Arts Trio
The Beaux Arts Trio of New York, since their first public performance in 1955 at the Berkshire Music Festival
in the United States, have carved out an international repu tation as one of the very greatest chamber music
ensembles in the world. Their records for Philips are at the top of every classical best-selling list and have won both
the Grand Prix du Disque and the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis. Charles Munch said that the Beaux Arts were
"worthy successors to the great Trio ofThibaud, Casals and Cortot" and Toscanini compared their playing to that
of the pre-war performances of Rubinstein, Heifetz and Feuermann. This high praise has been echoed again and
again at the Trio's many performances throughout the world. In June 1980, the Beaux Arts Trio gave a Wigmore
Master Concert to celebrate their 25th anniversary.
Menahem Pressler, the pianist, was taken to Israel from Germany by his parents when Hitler came to power.
He had started his musical studies in Madge burg and so took up his professional career in his adopted country. He
became internationally known when he won the Claude Debussy prize at the age of seventeen. That also earned
him five appearances with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which in turn brought him an unprecedented three year
contract for appearances with that world-famous orchestra. He has appeared as soloist with leading orchestras and
conductors all over the world and now makes his home in Bloomington, Indiana, where he is a professor at the
University of Indiana.
Bernard Greenhouse, the Trio's cellist, was a fellowship student at Juilliard but went to Europe for an
audition with Pablo Casals, which turned into two years of study with the great master. After completing his
studies, Greenhouse established a fine reputation in recitals and concerts throughout most of the great music
centres of Europe and the United States. He is a renowned teacher and is on the faculties of the Manhattan School
of Music, New York State University and the University ofHartford. He plays the famous " Paganini" Stradivarius
cello wi}ich is dated 1707.
Isidore Cohen, violin, was born in New York and studied atJuilliard under Ivan Galamian. He was leader of
the Little Orchestra Society of New York and has been leader with many other orchestral ensembles including the
Casals Festival in Puerto Rico and the Mozart Festival in New York's Lincoln Centre. His extensive chamber
music background includes guest appearances with the Budapest Quartet and in the important American series
"Music from Marlboro".
In 1985 the Trio will be celebrating their 30th anniversary and their Wigmore Hall concert on Sunday evening,
20th January, will mark the occasion.
PROGRAMME====================
Would patrons with digital watch alarms please ensure that they are switched ofT
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Trio in B f1at, op. ll
I. Allegro con brio 2. Adagio 3. Tema: Pria ch'io l'impegno
The original version of this work composed in 1798, calls for the unusual combination of clarinet, cello and piano. It was
probably written for the clarinettist Beer who, according to Czerny, requested the closing set of variations on a theme taken,
unknown to Beethoven, from an opera by Weigl, L' Amor Marinaro, first heard in Vienna in October 1797. Beethoven is said
to have been very angry at later finding out the origin of the theme and to have promised to write a replacement finale which
he never did.
Curiously, the clarinet part never descends to the bottom fourth of the register, so that transcription for violin is very simple
and may even have been Beethoven's first intention. It is a worthy sequel to the three great piano trios, op. l , with which he
dazzled Vienna in 1795. The first and second movements display two major components ofBeethoven's musical personality,
respectively great energy and great melodic beauty. Both of course display an astonishing command of modulation and
contrast also.
Weigl's jaunty tune yields nine variations in the last of which a finale is embedded. The first is for piano alone, in the second
the piano is silent. Variation four is almost unbearably sombre, in the minor, the fifth equivalently assertive, in the major.
The seventh is minor too. The eighth is pure melody, and the ninth introduces trills which meander into a strange key (G) for
a false start and then a brisk close in the correct key.
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Piano Trio
I. Modere 2. Pantoum: assez:. vif 3. Passacaille: tres large 4. Final: anime
We know when Ravel wrote his Trio, but not why. The choice of these three instruments in a combination associated principally
with Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, was not what Ravel, with his preference for exotic and unusual texts and for
ready-made musical idioms (Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, baroque, etc), would lead one to expect, especially since he had
recently set three poems by Mallarme for voice with unconventional accompaniment. Suggested by Schoenberg's Pierrot
Lunaire these songs show Ravel eager to experiment with new instrumental combinations. Then he wrote a Piano Trio, not
to a commission and with no stated purpose in view.
The probable explanation, so far as it ass ists in solving the riddle, is that although the composition belongs to 1914 the idea
was evidently born in 1908 when his horizons were narrower. In 1914 something prompted him to discharge this old debt or
resume work on his old sketches. Most of it was finished by August 1914 when news reached him at St-J ean-de-Luz (on the
Atlantic coast near Spain) of the outbreak of war. Anxious to enlist he hastened completion of the work. "I wanted to finish
the Trio as if it were to be a posthumous work. That does not mean I have lavished genius upon it but just that the
manuscript and notes are in sufficiently good order for someone else to correct the proofs."
Perhaps too one may see the two string instruments as embodying Ravel's deep attachment to linear purity, while the piano
allows him those dense but meticulously calculated chords that contribute so much of the work's unique harmonic colour.
The harmonic spice often springs from chromatic notes moving against static pedal notes, as at the beginning, where the
haunting chords and rhythms of the right hand are in opposition to the static and regular pulse of the left hand. When the
strings reply they are set two octaves apart, one of Ravel's trademarks found frequently in this work. There is a contrasting
second subject with a simple outline and a faintly Russian flavour and both main themes combine.
The Pantoum is a Malayan verse form used by Verlaine and Baudelaire, and its application to this swift scherzo seems to
imply the continuous overlapping alternation of two separate ideas. For a trio section Ravel gives a hymn-like melody to the
piano while the strings continue the alternations of the scherzo. The rhythmic complexity of its notation emerges as the most
natural thing in the world, and the parties reverse roles. This movement has some of the headlong elan of La Valse, on which
he was working at the same time.
The Passacaille is both a tribute to baroque practices which Ravel always admired and copied, and a foretaste of the spare
linear style of his later years. The eight-bar ground is heard eleven times in a broad and spacious arch form. For his finale
Ravel adopts shifting metres of 5/ 4 and 7 I 4 and a heavier texture. It conveys the hectic mood of August 1914. In a calmer
Europe the Trio would no doubt have had-a calmer close.
Interval
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Piano Trio in E flat D929
1. Allegro 2. Andante con moto 3. Scherzo: Allegro moderato - Trio 4. Allegro moderato
Unlike most of Schubert's larger works this Trio was both performed and published in his lifetime. Its elder brother, the
great B flat Trio, was also performed, but it was posthumously published from a manuscript which has now disappeared so
that its origin has long remained obscure. It has recently been persuasively demonstrated (by Eva Badura-Skoda) that the B
flat Trio was composed in the autumn of 1827, with theE flat Trio (which is dated November 1827) soon after. The B flat
Trio was played by Schuppanzigh, the portly violinist whose quartet had introduced many of Beethoven's quartets,
including the late ones, on 26 December 1827, and again a month later. TheE flat work was played by the same group on
26 March 1828 in the music room of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Schubert sold both works to publishers, it seems:
Leidesdorf of Vienna (probably) bought the B flat Trio but failed to publish it; Probst of Leipzig bought theE flat Trio and
issued it in 1828. Copies reached Vienna in November, but whether Schubert ever saw one or not is uncertain: he died on
November 19th.
Schumann compared the two Trios by calling the B flat work "more passive, lyric and feminine", and theE flat Trio "more
spirited, masculine and dramatic." His verdict on the first movement of the present work was: " inspired by deep indignation
as well as boundless longing." He was perhaps referring to the striking contrast between the restless and energetic
exposition, where Schubert (unusually) keeps lyricism at arm's length, and the development, which proceeds with that
expansive, leisurely breadth of which Schubert was the master, allowing his melodies to spread endlessly onward and
upward: significantly he takes a long time returning to the main key and the opening subject, as if reluctant to abandon his
musings, so little is he concerned with 'developing' and so intently concerned with rambling.
For the second movement Schubert goes back to the steady tramping pace of the Great C major Symphony's slow movement
who e lovely oboe melody would almost fit this accompaniment. His tune here, though, is a Swedish folksong. Schubert's
friend Sonnleithner later recalled: "A young tenor, Isaak Albert Berg (who was later J enny Lind's first teacher) came to
Vienna in the winter of 1827-28 and had an introduction to the Misses Frohlich at whose house he often sang to a small
circle. He sang fo lk songs extremely well, and Schubert, who heard him on one of these occasions, was quite enchanted with
these Swedish songs. He asked for a copy of them and used the best of them as themes for theE flat Trio. Schubert made no
secret of it."
In fact only one Swedish song seems to have been used, although it evaded identification until 1978. Its special significance
is enhanced by its reappearance in the Finale, nostalgically recalled. Such emotive links between movements were scarcely
known at that t ime, especially with the quicker pulse of the Finale behind the still steady tread of the folksong, but
Mendelssohn had already done something similar in his Octet two years earlier and it was to become a stock-in-trade of
later composers. This Finale is in truth more celebrated for its enormous length. Originally over 1000 bars long, Schubert
himself recommended cuts adopted by most editions and most performers. The true Schubert ian would be happy if such
music went on for ever.
Hugh Macdonald. Copyright 1984
No recording or photographic equipment may be taken into the auditorium, nor used in any other pa rt of the Hall, without the prior
written permission of the management.
In accordance with the requirements of the Greater London Council:- Persons shall not be permitted to stand or sit in any of the gangways
intersecting the seating, or to sit in any of the other gangways. If standing is permitted in the gangways at the sides and rear of the seating, it shall be limited
to the numbers indicated in the notices exh ibited in those positions. o moking in the a uditorium.
Ten years old. Light years ahead
1973-1983
.... - ...... - ..
Scarsdale Place, Kensington, London W8 SSR. Telephone: 01-937 7211. Telex: 918835.
The Beaux Arts Trio on Philips.
BEETHOVEN: The Complete Piano Trios
7LP 6725 035 5MC 7655 035
BEETHOVEN: Piano Trio No.7
in B flat Op. 97 ·Archduke'
LP6570917 MC7310917
Musica da camera
HAYDN: The Last 8 Piano Trios
2LP 6768 361 2MC 7656 361
Musica da camera
SCHUBERT: The Complete Plano Trios
2LP6747431
SCHUBERT: Piano Trio in B flat Op. 99 D. 898
Adagio in E flat Op. posth. D. 897 'Notturno·
LP 6503 069 MC 7303 069
Musica da camera
Manufactured in Holland
PHILIPS
