String Trio

Considering that Mozart's Divertimento in E-flat is far and away the greatest string trio ever written, and one of the unquestionable monuments of chamber music generally, it doesn't get the attention that it surely deserves from either record labels or collectors. Perhaps the dearth of regularly constituted string trios (as opposed to quartets) has something to do with it, but the fact remains that there is no greater testament to Mozart's genius than this epic, nearly 50-minute-long masterpiece in six movements that contains not a second that fails to rise to the highest level of textural gorgeousness and supreme melodic inspiration. Happily, most performances understand how special the music is, and give it their best effort. This one is no exception. The Zimmerman Trio plays with remarkably accurate intonation and a ravishing tone that's also mindful of the Classical style. Schubert's single-movement trio makes the perfect coupling. It seems to grow right out of the Mozart until the end of the exposition, when Schubert suddenly sails in with some typically arresting harmony.

Melodiya presents recordings of chamber music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Alfred Schnittke performed by the trio led by the outstanding musician Mark Lubotsky. Despite a 200-year gap between them, the music of these composers has much in common. It is the versatility of the genre palette, the combination of daring and bold innovation and the sense of continuity, an acute awareness of the tragedy of earthly existence while maintaining an objective attitude to the art.

This CPO disc contains four pieces by Sofia Gubaidulina, a Russian-Tartar composer of singularly original and individualistic music. These are her three string quartets written up to 1993, and her "String Trio". Performances are given by The Danish Quartet, the ensemble of Tim Frederiksen (violin I), Arne Balk-Moeller (violin II), Claus Myrup (viola), and Henrik Brendstrup (cello). Sofia Gubaidulina's works for string quartet and string trio have always seemed to me to lie at the outskirts of her oeuvre, even though they contain the elements common to all her work that we have come to love. This is perhaps because of their intensity, a single-minded dedication to certain mystical principles without the variety of longer or larger works.

This review is actually to mention and comment briefly on competing recordings of Dohnanyi chamber works, primarily the First Piano Quintet, an amazing, melodic, well-crafted work from Dohnányi's student years and his Opus 1. Every movement has its felicities, including the catchy final movement with its 5/4 meter and obligatory fugal ending. There are competing versions of that work recorded by the Gabrieli Quartet with Wolfgang Manz, piano; the Vanbrugh Quartet, with Martin Roscoe, piano; and the Takacs Quartet with András Schiff.

Instrumental transcriptions of Johann Sebastian Bach's keyboard music have been legion witness just how many there are of The Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue and yet very few of them seem to catch on. One notable exception is violinist and conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky's 1985 trio arrangement of the Goldberg Variations, made to observe Bach's tercentenary and as a memorial to pianist Glenn Gould, more readily associated with the Goldbergs than perhaps any other musician aside from Johann Gottlieb Goldberg himself.