Classical Music | Music for Trio

Recorded on 09/26/2006, uploaded on 01/08/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Apart from his Piano Trio in E minor composed in 1944, Shostakovich composed only one other work for the ensemble of violin, cello and piano. The summer of 1923 he spent with his sister in the Crimean Peninsula. Originally, Shostakovich was sent there to recover his health, which he certainly did. Furthermore, as his sister reported in a letter to their mother, he had also fallen in love. The object of the composer’s burgeoning and untamed affection was Tatyana Glivenko. Though it would take her marriage to another man and the birth of her first child to cure Shostakovich from his unrequited love, it nonetheless brought forth from his pen a solitary movement, an Adagio in C minor, for piano trio. Shostakovich originally entitled the work with the Romantic title “Poème,” but it often appears now as his Piano Trio No. 1, op. 8.

Just under a quarter of an hour in length, the Trio mostly exemplifies a late Romantic style that Shostakovich embraced in his very early years as a composer and soon abandoned for the modern hybrid style for which he is known today. Indeed, there is little of the mature Shostakovich evident in this youthful work. A longing and searching chromatic motif, accompanied by tentative staccato harmonies upon its first hearing, is the principal idea of the trio and the basis of its subsequent themes and developments.        Joseph DuBose

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Trio No.1 in c minor, Op. 8           Dmitri Shostakovich

Shostakovich (1906 - 1975) is most often remembered today for his fifteen symphonies and for a series of fifteen string quartets.  He made two efforts in the piano trio format and also wrote a cycle of songs for soprano with piano trio.

Trio No. 1 was written in 1923, when Shostakovich was a 17 year-old student at the Petrograd Conservatory.  At less than twelve minutes in length, it is a study in concision; it accomplishes its musical gestures with precision and accuracy.  In this single movement work in a late Romantic style, Shostakovich aims to create original music for a post-Revolutionary society. The trio, characterized by many tempi and musical characters, was published after the composer's death.      Flatiron Trio

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.