Weinberg Penderecki Schnittke String Trios - Trio Lirico
Weinberg
Penderecki Schnittke String Trios - Trio Lirico
Audite 97.753
(54:57)
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The German ensemble Trio Lirico made an impressive debut on disc in 2016
with the two string trios of Max Reger. For their second album they have
ventured further into the 20th century, with recordings of the string trios by
Weinberg, Penderecki, and Schnittke. The liner note draws connections between
the three works by presenting them all as messages of defiance against
communist regimes, and as two of the three players grew up in the GDR, this
angle no doubt has a personal resonance. But the three works are characterized
more by contrast than similarity, and the program is cleverly structured to
move from the Shostakovich-like tonality of the Weinberg, via the complex mix
of Sonorism and tonality in the Penderecki, and finally on to the more austere
utterances of Schnittke.
Now that Weinberg has been fully recognized as a distinctive musical
voice, comparisons with his close friend Shostakovich seem increasingly redundant.
But the music of the String Trio, composed in 1950, comes closer than most, especially
in its outer movements. The difference is more one of temperament than
style—the chamber music of both composers works within the remit of Socialist
Realism, but Weinberg is less focused and furrow-browed. His musical discourse
is substantial and well argued, but you get the feeling that he could just drop
it all at any time, and make out it was all a joke. Many of Weinberg’s endings
give that impression too, functional but abrupt, without any grandstanding. This trio seems to just grind to a halt, an impression beautifully
realized by the players. The other interesting feature of Weinberg’s String
Trio is the distinctly Jewish Andante
middle movement, with a melody rich in augmented seconds and played with daring
portamento by violinist Franziska Pietsch. Performance-wise, this is the highlight
of the disc, and it’s little wonder that Spotify trailed the release with this
as a preview: It’s clearly the single of the album.
Penderecki’s String Trio opens with a series of polytonal dissonances. The
work was completed in 1991, but this opening looks back to the composer’s
avant-garde period in the 50s and 60s. It soon moves into other
areas—expressive, lyrical, even Minimalistic at times. Trio Lirico give an
impressively even account, maintaining the directness of expression while acknowledging
the music’s textural fluidity. Schnittke’s String Trio is probably the
best-known and most often recorded work here. It was written to commemorate the
centenary of the birth of Alban Berg in 1985, with Schnittke drawing on his own
German roots (his father was a German Jew and his mother Volga Deutsch) to plug into the Second Viennese School aesthetic.
In fact, the work demonstrates that Schnittke’s musical outlook was more
Russian than he would be prepared to admit; structurally ambiguous, filled with
progressions between unrelated harmonies, and regularly interrupted by the
sound of Orthodox Chant. The music is by turns anguished, furious, and meditative,
moods that Trio Lirico express with a direct passion.
The most obvious comparison for this release is a disc on Avie (2315)
from 2014 by the now-disbanded Ensemble Epomeo (review here). They presented an
identical program, but also included a collection of Signs, Games and Messages by Kurtág. Trio Lirico have the better
audio quality (surround-sound downloads are also available from the website,
audite.de), but the difference of interpretive approach in instructive. In the
new recording, Trio Lirico lives up to its name, and when any of these
composers lets their musical argument give way to a beautiful melody—and they
all do at some stage—the players really make the most of it, applying rubato
that often seems audacious against the Epomeo accounts. That really benefits
the Weinberg; the Andante movement
comes to life here in a way that makes it seem like a different piece compared
to Epomeo’s more pedestrian reading. In the Penderecki and Schnittke, the
superior audio gives an immediacy to the grinding dissonances that the earlier
recording can’t match. But there is something about Epomeo’s more austere
accounts that is lost in the floating and ethereal sound to Trio Lirico. That
is particularly the case in the Schnittke, where the Orthodox chant should feel
like a voice from beyond, an interjection into the musical discourse rather
than a continuation. But the sheer listenability of the Trio Lirico recording
is an advantage in all these works. The fact that the players can spin their melodic
lines, often across continually dissonant harmonies, allows the ear to follow
the musical argument in a way that requires much more effort with the earlier
release.
This review appears in Fanfare magazine issue 43:4.
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