RENCONTRES INÉDITES III

More than any other, the Piano Quartets are Brahms’s work of emancipation. Here we already find what was to become the musician’s trademark: a tempestuous Romantic vocabulary, with a mastery of balanced, almost symphonic musical architecture. In the exposition and recapitulation of the first movement, the motifs unfold with unparalleled mastery and a desire never to end. The development, by contrast, has the conciseness of the classical style, concentrating on the very first intervals of the first theme. The second movement, based on a variation of Robert Schumann’s Clara motif, is one of the earliest examples of the gentle, languorous scherzo, a genre in which Brahms particularly excelled. But if the first Piano Quartet made a lasting impression, it was above all thanks to its exuberant Finale, with its flamboyant gypsy spirit, paradoxically reviving a very old custom of which Haydn was the most illustrious exponent.  

As for Rachmaninoff’s elegiac Second Trio, dedicated to the death of Tchaikovsky, it follows a tradition inaugurated by the composer of Swan Lake himself: that of making the Piano Trio as the funeral genre par excellence, Tchaikovsky’s Trio being itself dedicated, like Rachmaninoff’s, “to the memory of a great artist”. Rachmaninoff’s use of the theme and variations form in the second movement, before a brief Finale plunges into the abyss, is a discreet tribute to his elder’s Trio. This is a work in which each of the three instruments can display the full extent of its lyricism and vocalism, and a perfect setting for our soloists Janine Jansen, Mischa Maisky and Daniil Trifonov.