The contrast between Shostakovich’s two piano trios could hardly be greater.
When he wrote the first in 1923, the young student composer was in love. His longing for fellow student Tatiana Glivenko peers out from behind the trio’s falling semitones and yearning melodies. 21 years later, the composer wrote his second trio in memory of a friend, the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky who died suddenly in 1944. As well as the dull, aching pain of grief there is manic energy in this piece, as much danse macabre as memorial.
The all-star trio of Gluzman, Moser and Sudbin bring authentic Russian lineage to Shostakovich’s works, filling the space in between them with trios of Apollonian beauty by Arvo Pärt and Franz Schubert. The latter’s first piano trio offers some light relief in its bright and sunny disposition and its ländler – an Austrian dance that is given a hopping, stomping and yodeling treatment here.
Photo: Helge Hansen, Bergen International Festival.