Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Piano Trio No. 2 in e minor, Op. 67, 1944
Despite his prodigious cycle of 15 string quartets, Shostakovich wrote sparingly for other chamber music ensembles: a cello sonata, violin sonata, piano quintet and two piano trios. His first piano trio was a single movement composition from 1923 written when Shostakovich was only 17. A student work, it is far out shadowed by the mature second piano trio, a substantial four-movement work offering the full range of Shostakovich's artistry and emotional intensity particularly as expressed so intimately in his "private" chamber music. In a kind of tradition following Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, Shostakovich created an elegiac trio in memory of his close friend Ivan Sollertinsky, a brilliant musicologist and critic who died suddenly of a heart attack while still a relatively young man. Written in the summer of 1944 in the midst of WWII, the trio, like many of Shostakovich's works, seems to comment more broadly on the tenor of the times suggesting an elegy for the tragic victims of war in general.
The trio begins very quietly in eerie high harmonics as a solo cello introduces a meditative subject in its highest range that grows, when joined by violin and piano into a weighty fugue, a prominent feature of other Shostakovich chamber works including the eighth quartet and the piano quintet. As in all three works, the fugue is deeply tinged with melancholy. Portions of the fugue subject transform into new thematic materials across of the movement of generally escalating motion and dynamics.
The brisk and spiky scherzo is unmistakably Shostakovich. It constantly teeters on the edge between lively and frantic, between rolling scales and harsh, repetitive rhythmic motifs like a jovial folk dance where escalating mirth swerves dizzily towards obsessive mania. The virtuosity seems to boil and effervesce into pizzicato bubbles as a brilliant string duo trades figure and ground with the piano.
The slow, third movement is a deeply-felt lament, a passionate funeral dirge that grows out of an initial stark chord progression from the piano laid like a grave stone to serve as a ground base in a chaconne form. The finale breaks the grief with a compelling musical narrative featuring a march, piquant folk dancing and a poignant, weeping recall of fugal subject from the first movement as the music becomes a literal manifestation of elegiac recall, a rushing memory of what has past and gone. Composer and critic Arthur Cohn notes in his typically terse but sharply perceptive style that here Shostakovich pictures "the horrible forced dance of Jews before they were machine-gunned to death." Whether the loss of a close friend or of a whole nation in the midst of a world war, the tragedy had a deep impact on Shostakovich: prefigured in the first movement, the sharply etched finale theme resurfaces yet again in the monumental personal testimony of the eighth quartet.
