David Matthews Piano Trios 1-3; Journeying Songs for Solo Cello. Lenore Piano Trio. Toccata CD; 24/96 Download 2017.
http://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/mat.../5060113443694
What a wonderful surprise!
A trio of trios, all under 20 minutes, these are marvels of inspired, endlessly varied concision. As with his orchestral music, your attention is compelled by that ability to switch from tight, fast rhythmical music to profound flowing melody; full rich songful textures suddenly drop back to spareness and emptiness, even bleakness. Wisps of phrase like spiders’ webs in the breeze.
The adagio of the 1993 2nd Trio is an elegiac barcarolle, a memorial for his partner of 10 years, novelist Maggie Hemingway. It will speak to anyone who has known sorrow, but may easily devastate the most innocent. There is darkness and pain, then yearning soaring melody, finally - no consolation; ending with the almost bitter alienation of pizzicato strings resonating drily against piano chords. There is a wild, even angry scherzo, as if trying to break the shackles of grief; the finale following seems to want to escape into sonic fantasy, tries to find a more consoling song but can’t, finally, leave sorrow alone, disappearing into high-harmonic abstractions at the close. Remarkable piece.
But then, there are any number of marvellous moments: the scherzo of No.1 (1983) is a mordant portrait of Hans Keller - “drily humorous”; the piano in its finale kept reminding me of the Balinese music from Poulenc’s Two-Piano Concerto.
The 3rd (2005) opens with a sonata-movement in which three melodic ideas are passed between the three instruments, continuously varied and developed, creating a single melodic line without harmony; until, magically, C major arrives in the coda (the only place I felt there was any direct reference to or echo of a specific work: the high harmonics here sound like an hommage to the end of the 1st movement of the Britten Violin Concerto.)
The finale of this 3rd Piano Trio, by some margin the longest movement of all, is a structurally and emotionally wide-ranging scherzo-within-andante which uses the same ideas as the 1st movement, but inverted. Its darkly eloquent song has bleaker, almost motionless episodes, as if doubting its own serenity; one idea takes off into a brief scherzo; but then the final Trio concludes quietly, seemingly at peace. Its finale seems an apt summation, looking back across the stylistic and emotional range of all three works.
Matthews is, as ever, endlessly recreative with classically-derived forms and models; contemporary music made old, or classical music made new? More of the past than the future in its haunting and elegant lines? Who knows? If so, all the deeper for that. “Romantic” yes, and in the line out of Tippett and Britten, perhaps “English” too, whatever that now might mean. But even if it were “the last of a noble line”, it would be too beautiful and fascinating to ignore. Matthews calls the Lenore Trio’s performances “definitive” and they have a rare and unrhetorical purity of utterance, very spaciously recorded. For me, totally captivating.
The composer’s note on No.3 has this to say: “The trio is dedicated to my friend, Alistair Hinton, the C major ending of whose magisterial string quintet I chanced to hear for the first time shortly after I’d sketched my own C major coda to my first movement, somehow confirming its rightness (both of us are well aware of Schoenberg’s famous pronouncement about that key), and whose lowest-A-on-the-piano ending of his Étude en forme de Chopin I gratefully appropriated for my own final chord.”
I’ve only scratched the surface of the rewards on offer here; if you succumb to the inevitable temptation of eating them all at once, well - there are 4 volumes of the rather more experimental and highly-wrought string quartets to satisfy the truly ravenous…
http://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/mat.../5060113443694
What a wonderful surprise!
A trio of trios, all under 20 minutes, these are marvels of inspired, endlessly varied concision. As with his orchestral music, your attention is compelled by that ability to switch from tight, fast rhythmical music to profound flowing melody; full rich songful textures suddenly drop back to spareness and emptiness, even bleakness. Wisps of phrase like spiders’ webs in the breeze.
The adagio of the 1993 2nd Trio is an elegiac barcarolle, a memorial for his partner of 10 years, novelist Maggie Hemingway. It will speak to anyone who has known sorrow, but may easily devastate the most innocent. There is darkness and pain, then yearning soaring melody, finally - no consolation; ending with the almost bitter alienation of pizzicato strings resonating drily against piano chords. There is a wild, even angry scherzo, as if trying to break the shackles of grief; the finale following seems to want to escape into sonic fantasy, tries to find a more consoling song but can’t, finally, leave sorrow alone, disappearing into high-harmonic abstractions at the close. Remarkable piece.
But then, there are any number of marvellous moments: the scherzo of No.1 (1983) is a mordant portrait of Hans Keller - “drily humorous”; the piano in its finale kept reminding me of the Balinese music from Poulenc’s Two-Piano Concerto.
The 3rd (2005) opens with a sonata-movement in which three melodic ideas are passed between the three instruments, continuously varied and developed, creating a single melodic line without harmony; until, magically, C major arrives in the coda (the only place I felt there was any direct reference to or echo of a specific work: the high harmonics here sound like an hommage to the end of the 1st movement of the Britten Violin Concerto.)
The finale of this 3rd Piano Trio, by some margin the longest movement of all, is a structurally and emotionally wide-ranging scherzo-within-andante which uses the same ideas as the 1st movement, but inverted. Its darkly eloquent song has bleaker, almost motionless episodes, as if doubting its own serenity; one idea takes off into a brief scherzo; but then the final Trio concludes quietly, seemingly at peace. Its finale seems an apt summation, looking back across the stylistic and emotional range of all three works.
Matthews is, as ever, endlessly recreative with classically-derived forms and models; contemporary music made old, or classical music made new? More of the past than the future in its haunting and elegant lines? Who knows? If so, all the deeper for that. “Romantic” yes, and in the line out of Tippett and Britten, perhaps “English” too, whatever that now might mean. But even if it were “the last of a noble line”, it would be too beautiful and fascinating to ignore. Matthews calls the Lenore Trio’s performances “definitive” and they have a rare and unrhetorical purity of utterance, very spaciously recorded. For me, totally captivating.
The composer’s note on No.3 has this to say: “The trio is dedicated to my friend, Alistair Hinton, the C major ending of whose magisterial string quintet I chanced to hear for the first time shortly after I’d sketched my own C major coda to my first movement, somehow confirming its rightness (both of us are well aware of Schoenberg’s famous pronouncement about that key), and whose lowest-A-on-the-piano ending of his Étude en forme de Chopin I gratefully appropriated for my own final chord.”
I’ve only scratched the surface of the rewards on offer here; if you succumb to the inevitable temptation of eating them all at once, well - there are 4 volumes of the rather more experimental and highly-wrought string quartets to satisfy the truly ravenous…
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