Ibuki Trio - Ravel & Shostakovich: Piano Trios (2012/2025)

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Ibuki Trio - Ravel & Shostakovich: Piano Trios (2012/2025)

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Maurice Ravel’s piano trio was the result of an earlier war insinuating itself into his composition. The work’s first movements, however, were conceived as far from war as imaginable. Early summer 1914 found Ravel at his happiest, holidaying with Alexandre Benois in the Basque town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, on the Atlantic coast half a mile from Ravel’s birthplace of Ciboure. It is said that it was watching ice-cream vendors dancing a fandango at Saint-Jean-de-Luz that Ravel picked up the first theme of his Trio in A, a theme which he incorrectly believed to be Basque. As Shostakovich noted whilst writing his second piano trio “the concept of `popular spirit in art’ must not be vulgarised or impoverished by being reduced to the mere task of using musical intonations from folk life. To be `popular in spirit’ is to be intrinsically linked to the whole classical heritage of our people, right up to the highest achievements of … symphony and opera music.” Ravel excelled in `intrinsically linking’ world music’s into his classical heritage (most startlingly in Chansons Madecassses). The Pantoum, Assez vif integrates a complex Malayan verse-form with music. Difficult enough to realise in poetry (it was used by Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du Mal), let alone music, the Pantoum requires two distinct ideas to make sense both in alternation and in combination. To these motifs Ravel adds a third lyrical, augmented theme, binding together the middle of the Pantoum.

The sudden outbreak of war came as a great shock to Ravel. Travelling to Paris, the fragile Ravel called in every favour in a futile attempt to fight – “I know I am working for the nation in writing music … but that’s no consolation.” Ravel accelerated his work, hoping to complete the trio before serving his country. Whilst there is no record of the chronology of composition of the movements, it seems the shadow of war colours the vast arch that forms the Passacaille, Très large. Although not a true passagalia – the theme never quite constantly repeats -Ravel, as in Boléro and La Valse, demonstrates his extraordinary ability to shape musical structure. As Pablo Casals would have it: “Rainbows … rainbows: nearly all music is like that. If one only makes this observation it is already a guide.” The Final, Animé sees Ravel, the most gifted of orchestrators; stretch the sonorities of the piano trio, sonorities he was not always convinced that performers fully realised. If a political dimension is to be discerned in the second half of the trio, then here is a trumpeted praise of the French government of `Sacred Union’.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s second piano trio, Op. 67 opens with three distinct voices speaking in counterpoint. One of these, the high `weeping child’ harmonics of the cello, recollect that Shostakovich worked on the trio shortly after the sudden death of one of his closest friends, Ivan Sollertinsky, in February 1944.

The relentless, angular Allegro con brio, however, reflects the parallels Shostakovich drew between military victory and cultural strength. After consecutive Octobers facing Germans at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad, Shostakovich wrote that “nothing fills my heart with more pride than the thunder of guns firing a salute over our capital. Never in history has the glory of the Russian armed forces been so high”, whilst noting that “Russian chamber music is blossoming today, producing works of classical importance. The remarkable development of the national music of the non-Russian Soviet republics is also widely known.”

The remainder of the trio is unremittingly bleak. Eight terrifying, deathly keyboard chords herald the Largo, above repetitions of which the violin and cello plaintively dialogue; as the trio was being written, Shostakovich could not have been unaware of the horrors of the Nazi atrocities committed during the German retreat. The final Allegretto – Adagio draws on a Jewish dance of death, the Hasidic vehicle for redemption. Despair is built into the very fabric of the movement as a massive enlargement of the dance modulates downwards over the course of three hundred bars. Significantly, these dance motifs reoccur in the autobiographical eighth quartet, overlaid with Shostakovich’s initials -D (E)sCH.

Shostakovich doesn’t merely sympathize with the plight of the Jewish people; he identifies himself as a Jew. As life departs the dance all that is left is a recapitulation of the Largo’s funereal chords, amplified by the weeping harmonics of the trio’s opening.