(++++) CONNECTIONS

Dvořák: Piano Trio No. 3; Josef Suk: Piano Trio; Elegy in D-flat; Rudolf Friml: Piano Trio “Rural Life in Bohemia.” Hermitage Piano Trio (Misha Keylin, violin; Sergey Antonov, cello; Ilya Kazantsev, piano). Reference Recordings. $24.98 (SACD). 

Brahms: Clarinet Quintet; Clarinet Trio; Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2 for Clarinet or Viola and Piano. Rúnar Óskarsson, clarinet; Helga Bryndís Magnúsdóttir, piano; Sigurđur Bjarki Gunnarsson, cello; Siggi String Quartet (Una Sveinbjarnardóttir and Helga Þóra Björgvinsdóttir, violins; Þórunn Ósk Marinósdóttir, viola; Sigurđur Bjarki Gunnarsson, cello). Sono Luminus. $16.99 (2 CDs). 

     Although not as well-known as his fourth and final trio for piano, violin and cello (the “Dumky”), Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 3 is a substantial work both musically and emotionally – and the linchpin of an interestingly conceived Reference Recordings release featuring the Hermitage Piano Trio. Dvořák’s work is of significant length – more than 40 minutes – and darkly dramatic almost throughout. It is in F minor – all Dvořák’s piano trios except No. 1 are in minor keys – and permeated both by emotion and by dance forms modified to accommodate the changing moods of the four movements. The trio contrasts interestingly with the Scherzo Capriccioso, written later in the same year (1883), as if the pervasive darkness of the chamber work is balanced, at least to an extent, by the ebullience of the orchestral one. The Hermitage Piano Trio plumbs Dvořák’s music elegantly and with suitable intensity, but without overdoing the work’s emotionalism to the point of sentimentality. By the time the final movement reaches its resilient if scarcely bright conclusion, the players have managed thoroughly to explore its emotional foundations to allow its full impact to come forth. The Dvořák is by far the most substantial work on this recording, but the other pieces on this very fine-sounding SACD compare and contrast well with it. Sequentially, it is followed on the disc by the Elegy in D-flat by Dvořák’s son-in-law, Josef Suk (1874-1935). This work was originally written for a stage play and was interestingly scored for violin, cello, string quartet, harmonium and harp before Suk arranged it as heard here. Dating to 1902, this Elegy is suitably gloomy but pervaded by thematic beauty and a generally gentle flow that sounds very much like Dvořák’s. The restraint of the Hermitage Piano Trio is notable here: everything is in its place, nothing is overdone, and the music flows and flowers naturally. The Elegy is one of only two Suk works for piano trio, the other being a slightly earlier (1898-1891) trio also heard on this recording. A much less ambitious work than Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 3, Suk’s is a student piece that in fact earned him admission to Dvořák’s  master class in composition. Suk’s trio contains elements similar to those favored by Dvořák himself, including modified folk dances and considerable warmth and lyricism. It is, however, somewhat on the thin side, being less than half as long as Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 3 and much less emotionally exploratory – but it is, after all, a student work, and it does effectively showcase Suk’s abilities in forms ranging from dance to march. Again the Hermitage Piano Trio avoids trying to make the piece into something grander than it is: the work’s pleasantries come through clearly and without pretense. The two Suk works are separated on the recording by a world première: the Piano Trio “Rural Life in Bohemia” by Rudolf Friml (1879-1972) has not been recorded before. Friml’s Dvořák connection is less well-known than Suk’s but was significant: Dvořák was, for a time, his composition teacher. Nowadays Friml is remembered as an operetta, stage and film composer, but he did produce a substantial amount of concert-hall music and had, like Dvořák, a strong sense of Czech nationalism. Friml’s single-movement trio, written in 1918, is a brief five-section work that is brighter (and slighter) than anything else on this disc: despite its date, it shows no sign of postwar trauma or even questioning, instead offering a series of pleasant, wistful dances, at most mildly melancholic, interspersed with the sort of sweeping, swooning lyricism that made Friml’s stage and screen music so popular. Immediately appealing and determinedly surface-level throughout, Friml’s trio comes across as snapshots of a time long gone – old-style picture postcards, but in music – and sounds more like a paean to the past than do the earlier works by Dvořák and Suk. The mingling of Czech nationalism and late-Romantic harmonic sensibility, plus the intertwined lives of these three composers, show their different-but-related ways of processing their similar musical backgrounds, with the Hermitage Piano Trio doing a fine job of highlighting both the parallels among the works and their sometimes subtle differences of form and expression. 

     Just as Dvořák’s relationships with Suk and Friml were personal as well as musical, so a similar dual form of relationship existed between Dvořák and Brahms – but in this case it was Brahms, eight years older than Dvořák, who served as mentor as the two men developed their close and long-lasting friendship. The story is well-known of how Brahms paved the way for Dvořák to build an international reputation – all the while staying true to his own musical predisposition, which was quite different from the more-nationalistic one of Dvořák. Brahms interconnected musically and personally with other important figures as well: Clara Schumann for many years, Robert Schumann until his early death, and Richard Mühlfeld at the end of Brahms’ own creative career, to name three. Mühlfeld became first clarinetist of the Meiningen Court Orchestra in 1876, and it is intriguing to realize that until that point he had been a violinist – had he continued in that role, music would have been the poorer for it. As actually happened, Mühlfeld’s clarinet playing inspired Brahms, who had gone into self-imposed creative retirement, to reemerge compositionally and create four great clarinet-focused works: his quintet, trio and two sonatas that were Brahms’ last pieces of chamber music. The complete set of these four clarinet explorations receives sensitive and beautifully balanced performances from a bevy of Icelandic musicians on a new two-CD release from Sono Luminus. Clarinetist Rúnar Óskarsson is the headline performer, given the repertoire, but he is so ably abetted by the other players that he emerges as primus inter pares rather than an overarching presence. And the music is all the better for it: Brahms showed his mastery of blending in these four pieces, integrating the clarinet with other instruments with a level of subtlety that results in an ensemble sound in which everyone shares the spotlight even though the clarinet is, at the same time, in the forefront. The balancing act is quite a remarkable one, and performers who are sensitive to it – as these players are – are able to deliver chamber music that is quite unlike anything else Brahms wrote. The motivic interweaving of themes in the quintet, which is the largest-scale of these four works, is well-displayed in Óskarsson’s performance with the Siggi Quartet. The care with which Brahms positions the woodwind in accord with the piano and cello in the trio is matched here by the sensitivity that Helga Bryndís Magnúsdóttir and Sigurđur Bjarki Gunnarsson bring to their portions of the music. And the two sonatas – with which Brahms himself toured with Mühlfeld in readings that so impressed the composer that he gave all the fees to his clarinet partner – come across here as sublimely expressive, glowing instrumental pairings in which the back-and-forth between Óskarsson and Magnúsdóttir fits the musical meshing to perfection. 

     Connections between and among composers are musically meaningful in one way, those between and among the performances who re-create their music in another. Especially in chamber music, a kind of blurring of the self in favor of expressive mutuality goes a long way toward communicating a composer’s intentions and bringing the music’s feelings and meaning to an audience. The emotional expressiveness of composers such as Brahms and Dvořák benefits to an especially great degree from performers such as those heard in these two releases – who delve into the music in ways that draw composer and listener together in a melding of interdependence and understanding.