Sitkovetsky Trio Beethoven

With the three piano trios published in 1795, Op. 1, Ludwig van Beethoven took a genre still largely associated with salon music and raised it up to rival the string quartet. In these works, Beethoven saw the true start of his creative journey.

With the three piano trios, Op. 1, Ludwig van Beethoven took a genre still largely associated with salon music and raised it up to rival the string quartet. The works are innovative in form as well as in content. From this collection, the Trio in G major, Op. 1 No. 2, appears as a cheerful and engaging work. While it has been said that one could discern ‘the master’s happy youth […] still unclouded, light and frivolous’, hints of ‘the deep seriousness and tender intimacy that would follow’ can also be found.

With the three piano trios Op.1 Ludwig van Beethoven took a genre still largely associated with entertaining salon music, and raised it up to rival the string quartet. The works are innovative in form as well as in content especially so in the case of the Trio No. 3 in C minor, Beethovens trademark key. It is therefore fitting that the Sitkovetsky Trio has chosen this work to open their cycle of the composers piano trios.

With the three piano trios Op. 1 Ludwig van Beethoven took a genre still largely associated with entertaining salon music, and raised it up to rival the string quartet. The works are innovative in form as well as in content – especially so in the case of the Trio No. 3 in C minor, Beethoven’s trademark key. It is therefore fitting that the Sitkovetsky Trio has chosen this work to open their cycle of the composer’s piano trios.

With the three piano trios Op. 1 Ludwig van Beethoven took a genre still largely associated with entertaining salon music, and raised it up to rival the string quartet. The works are innovative in form as well as in content – especially so in the case of the Trio No. 3 in C minor, Beethoven’s trademark key. It is therefore fitting that the Sitkovetsky Trio has chosen this work to open their cycle of the composer’s piano trios.

In 1892, when Camille Saint-Saëns started on his Piano Trio No. 2, almost 30 years had passed since his first, widely celebrated work in the genre, his Op. 18. In the meantime the composer had come to be regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned by many of his colleagues. In writing the trio, Saint-Saëns remained true to his principles as a composer, striving for balance and clarity and avoiding the chromaticism that had become so prevalent in the wake of Wagner. It is nevertheless an unexpectedly personal work, cast, in the unusual form of a symmetrical arch in five parts: two substantial and dramatic Allegros frame three shorter movements, without a proper scherzo or a true slow movement.

'The masterpiece of our time in the trio genre' is how Robert Schumann described Mendelssohn's Piano Trio in D minor when he reviewed the work upon its publication in 1840. Comparing it to the trios by Beethoven and Schubert, Schumann continued: 'a very beautiful composition, which in years to come will continue to delight our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.' And so it has the D minor trio remains one of the most popular of Mendelssohn's chamber works, uniting the composer's gift for melody with his feeling for textures and formal mastery. A few years later he penned the Piano Trio No. 2 in C minor between February and April 1845. An intensely emotional first movement is followed by a blissful Andante espressivo and a shimmering, truly Mendelsohnian Scherzo. The Finale returns to the passionate mood of the opening, but in the course of the movement hymn-like allusions appear and lend an air of sacred celebration to the movement. These two highpoints in the Romantic repertoire for piano trio are here performed by the young Sitkovetsky Trio.

Pop the champagne corks, for when this French programme is appearing only the year after a fine first volume of Beethoven Trios, it looks very much as though Sitkovetsky Trio are in a new rhythm of regular recordings, following Isang Enders replacing Leonard Elschenbroich as cellist in 2019.