Osiris Trio Program
Piano Trio No. 10 (Variations on an Original Theme in E flat major), op.44
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Three Nocturnes (1924)
Ernest Bloch (1880-1959)
I. Andante
I. II. Andante quieto
III. Tempestoso - Calmo - Maestoso - Con moto
Trio on Irish Folk Tunes
Frank Martin (1890-1974)
Allegro
Adagio
Gigue
Intermission
Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor, op.66
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Allegro energico e con fuoco
Andante espressivo
Scherzo, molto allegro quasi presto
Finale, allegro appassionato
Vera Beths plays a 1727 Stradivarius violin
Larissa Groeneveld plays a Domenico Busan cello (Venice 1768)
OSIRIS PIANO TRIO
Praised by the New York Times for their “edgy brilliance” and “largeness in every musical dimension of color, dynamic range and expression,” the Osiris Trio made their American début in April 1997 with a very successful performance in Carnegie Recital Hall. Recent U.S. tours included New York City’s Frick Collection, Washington DC’s National Gallery and Library of Congress, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society, the Ensemble Music Society of Indianpolis, and other prestigious series. Their Canadian début in October 2002 was hailed as “incandescent and revelatory” by Review Vancouver.
Aside from numerous concerts in the Netherlands, the Osiris Trio has performed in France, England, Germany, Japan, Australia, Scandinavia, Iceland, Estonia, and South Africa. Of particular significance were the concerts given on the Rising Stars series of the European Concert Halls Organisation, which took the trio to the major European concert stages in Amsterdam, Cologne, Frankfurt, Vienna and Stockholm.
The trio was founded in 1988 as a result of a successful performance in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Recital Hall. As early as March 1992, their third season, the Osiris Trio was awarded an important prize: the Philip Morris Finest Selection. In June 1997 they received the Annie Bosboom Prize to further encourage their international career.
The Osiris Trio has recorded a number of CDs on the Channel Classics label, including works by Mendelssohn, Haydn, Frank Martin, Beethoven, Dvorák and Ives. Major Dutch composers including Theo Loevendie, Theo Verbey, Willem Jeths and Roel van Oosten have written works for the Osiris Trio.
PROGRAM NOTES
BEETHOVEN:
Despite their designation as Op. 44, these variations on an original theme actually were sketched as early as 1792, about the same time that Beethoven was working on his Opus 1, a set of three piano trios. Consequently the Variations have much the same character as these famously promising early piano trios. (The Variations were not published until 1804, thus the mature Opus number.) As Beethoven evolved creatively, he composed chamber music for piano and strings in which the instruments participate equally in the musical conversation. By contrast, in the works for piano trio from early in his career, he had not yet liberated the form from the conventions of the classical era, when piano trios were written for mass consumption by amateur players. These trios were usually dominated by the piano, with the strings in an accompanying role. But Beethoven began to liberate the cello from the subordinate function that it had served in the past, which had been to support the bass line of the piano. And he gave an independent voice to the violin, which could now often serve as a leader or in duet with the cello with the piano subordinate. Although the force of Beethoven's personality and the richness of his musical imagination inform all of the Op. 44 Variations, the balance among the instruments that the composer would achieve in his later music is not yet fully in evidence. The piano is dominant in the statement of the theme, most of the fourteen variations, and in the coda. In fact, when Beethoven's friend, Anton Schindler, wrote his biography of the composer during the late 1850s, he referred to Op. 44 as "variations for piano with accompaniment." Nevertheless, signs of Beethoven's innovations are apparent in Op. 44. The third variation gives prominence to the violin, and the fourth features the cello. The seventh and eleventh variations are essentially duets for violin and cello with piano accompaniment. However, it is the twelfth variation that is most striking in its integration of all three instruments and that looks forward to the evolution of the mature composer.
BLOCH:
Ernest Bloch, best known for his cello concerto "Schelomo," was born in Switzerland in 1880, and moved to the United States in 1916. The Three Nocturnes were written in this country, and were dedicated to the New York Trio. The pieces seem to reveal a nostalgia for Europe, particularly the musical tradition that lay at the crossroads of neoclassicism and the world of Ravel, and even Honegger.
He was of a Swiss-Jewish family and much of his work is strongly Jewish. He studied in Geneva and other European capitals between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two and was later much in demand as a teacher of composition. He took American citizenship in 1924. In 1930 an endowment enabled him to return to Europe and to full-time composing for eight years; he then returned to America in 1938 and spent the rest of his life composing.
Nocturnes are night music, and these three pieces show three different aspects of the night—the tranquil quiet, perhaps of stars and a gentle breeze, a tender lullaby, and the pent-up excitement of a midnight chase.
MARTIN:
When Swiss composer Frank Martin wrote this trio in 1925, every composer in Europe was exploring rhythm. Bartók and Stravinsky adapted rhythms from folk music, Hindemith in his notorious “Suite 1922” made use of popular music, and Milhaud and Honegger used elements of jazz. Martin’s stay in Paris in 1924-25 further sharpened his fascinating with rhythm. He immersed himself in the rhythms of ancient Greece, Bulgaria and the Far East. The results of this study can be heard both in this trio and in his orchestral work “Rhythms” (1926), and ultimately led to Martin’s appointment as professor of improvisation and rhythmic theory at Geneva’s Dalcroze Institute.
The trio was commissioned by a wealthy American patron of the arts, himself an amateur musician, who requested that Martin use popular Irish folk melodies. Instead, however, Martin went to the Bibliotčque National de Paris, where he found forgotten Irish songs from earlier centuries, which were unfamiliar to his American patron. This, combined with the trio’s great difficulty of execution, led to the patron’s cancelling his commission. The result, however, is breathtaking. The melodies are distributed over the trio’s three movements, and recombined with each other in innumerable ingenious ways. They are transformed, shortened, and extended, but above all they are used as counters in a game of continuously changing meters and polyrhythms in which violin, cello and piano apparently proceed on independent courses. But the superimposed layers which do not interfere with each other, the long, arching phrases, the wealth of rhythmic diversity, and Martin’s own highly recognizable idiom (in addition to the influences of Bartók, Ravel and jazz) make this trio a true milestone in Martin’s early oeuvre.
MENDELSSOHN:
Although recognized early as a child prodigy, Felix Mendelssohn was never exploited for this. His parents kept a watchful eye on other sides of his personal development; at the age of twelve, he was initiated into philosophy and literature by none other than the aging Goethe. Far from the typical suffering "romantic artist," Mendelssohn was a hardworking family man without financial worries, a loving husband and a devoted father. A tireless supporter of the compositions of others, especially Bach, he founded a highly principled style of musical education and was a driving force behind the concert life in various European capitals. He was well-traveled and well-read, modest and courteous, and at the end of his short life (Beethoven and Schubert had recently died, while Chopin, Liszt and Schumann had yet to reach the peak of their fame), he was heralded by many as the greatest composer of his era.
Anti-Semitism led Mendelssohn’s parents to have their four children baptized and to add the less Jewish-sounding “Bartholdy” to their surname. But protecting the children from anti-Semitism proved to be a vain hope. Wagner would publicly question whether this "Jew" had managed to give expression to the true German spirit. The monument erected to Mendelssohn in Leipzig was demolished on the night of November 10, 1936, Kristallnacht—a precursor to the attempted annihilation of Jewish culture in Europe.
The exchange of letters between Felix and his older sister Fanny testifies to their profound relationship. Her death was a blow from which Felix never fully recovered. Torn apart by his loss and close to complete physical exhaustion, the 38-year old Felix soon suffered a brain hemorrhage. A second stroke proved to be fatal.
The second trio came in to being during a visit to Bad Soden near Frankfurt in Hessen, where Mendelssohn spent summers with his family. It was dedicated to Louis Spohr and premiered in 1845 in the Gewandhaus in Leipzig by the same musicians who had premiered his first trio, in D minor, six years earlier.
In the second trio, one hears, beside Mendelssohn’s sheer talent, echoes of Schubert, Beethoven and Bach, to mention but the most famous composers that Mendelssohn considered his musical forefathers and whose works he continuously performed and defended. Mendelssohn even explicitly tips his cap in the direction of fellow townsman J.S. Bach, as can be heard in the close affinity between the chorale in the fourth movement of the piano trio and the opening chorus of Bach’s cantata, Herr Gott, Dich loben alle wir.
“The Osiris blends utmost cohesion and tonal focus with expressive subtlety and urgency.” – Cleveland Plain Dealer
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