Modest Trio

Brad Mehldau Trio - Ode (2012) {Nonesuch}
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© 2012 Nonesuch Records | 7559-79628-2
Jazz / Post Bop / Piano

The Brad Mehldau Trio, featuring Larry Grenadier on bass and Jeff Ballard on drums, returns with Ode, an album of 11 previously unreleased songs composed by Mehldau. The record, which is the first from the trio since 2008’s Live Village Vanguard disc and the first studio trio recording since 2005’s Day Is Done, is out this week in the UK and this coming Tuesday in North America. Many of the songs on the new album were written as tributes, or “odes,” to real and fictional people, such as the late saxophonist Michael Brecker (“M.B.”), a character from the film Easy Rider (“Wyatt’s Eulogy for George Hanson”), and the guitarist Kurt Ronsenwinkel (“Kurt Vibe”).

This is the second disc devoted by the Chinese-German Trio Parnassus to the chamber music of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, the dedicatee of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3. The prince was an aristocratic patron for whom the irascible Beethoven actually had musical respect, noting that he played not "in a princely or royal manner but rather like a competent piano player." Ferdinand, who was killed by Napoleon's troops in 1806, in turn venerated Beethoven, but the strongest tribute to his talent is that as a composer he wrote music that neither aped Beethoven's nor took refuge in Classical models.

Although their music sounds entirely original, The Erlend Apneseth Trio represents a close to perfect improvisational update on that very contemporary format of the post-modern string trio, like a Nordic riposte to Tin Hat or Trio Taksim…

The first chamber music album 'Ravel & Chausson' by Claire Huangci as part of the Trio Machiavelli has been released today. The combination of Maurice Ravel's Piano Trio and Ernest Chausson's Piano Quartet marks an encounter between two works of opposite character.

This is music from Norway, from Bergen specifically, written in the early eighteenth century. Composer Georg von Bertouch has an interesting biography; a German-born musician of French extraction, he was also a military leader who participated in 22 battles in Denmark (of which Norway was a part), Germany, and France. A bit older than Bach and Telemann, and geographically even farther removed from the fonts of Italian innovation, he did not (on the evidence of the music here) engage with Vivaldi or with Telemann's galant styles.

Weber’s chamber music – just these three pieces if you don’t count the duos – clearly shows him on the cusp between Classical and Romantic. The Quartet for piano and strings, written in his early twenties between 1807 and 1809, begins with a Haydnesque gracefulness and politeness which is gradually invaded by more unruly harmonies and textures; the dramatic slow movement looks ahead to Schumann, while the closing fugue of the finale dresses 18th-century procedures in 19th-century colours. Then there’s the element of virtuosity which is a hallmark of the early Romantic era, in the showy piano part of the Quartet, which Weber wrote for himself, the concerto-like clarinet part in the Quintet with strings, designed for the pioneering Heinrich Baermann, and all three parts of the tuneful Trio for flute, cello and piano. The talented members of the pan-European Gaudier Ensemble are perfectly equipped to convey these different aspects of Weber’s musical personality, with the fleet-fingered pianist Susan Tomes leading the way in the Quartet and Trio, and Richard Hosford in the Clarinet Quintet recalling contemporary descriptions of Baermann’s own effortless brilliance.