Mozart, Hatzis and Arensky

Donna Song, piano Jennie Press, violin Lee Duckles. Cello Program Notes This morning’s program traces three very different relationships between violin, cello, and piano: Mozart's effortless equality among the three voices, Hatzis's headlong collision of nostalgia and passion, and Arensky's elegy transformed into tribute. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Piano Trio in C major, K. 548 Mozart wrote this trio in July 1788, during the same extraordinarily fertile summer that produced his final three symphonies. It was, by contrast, a difficult season at home — debts were mounting, his wife Constanze was unwell, and the family had just moved to cheaper lodgings on the outskirts of Vienna — yet little of that strain surfaces in the music itself. K. 548 opens with confident, assertive octaves, answered by delicate, questioning replies from the piano, before flamboyant scales sweep the mood toward something sunnier. The central Andante cantabile, in F major, is warm and lyrical, while the closing Allegro restores the high spirits of the opening. Throughout, piano and strings trade material as true equals — a hallmark of Mozart's late chamber writing, and a quiet rebuttal to the troubles of that particular summer. Christos Hatzis (b. 1953) "Old Photographs" "Old Photographs" began life as a movement within Constantinople , Canadian composer Christos Hatzis's sprawling multimedia music-theatre work for soprano, Middle Eastern vocalist, piano trio, and electronics. Where much of that larger piece weaves together medieval chant, urban gospel, Sufi song, and Cretan folk music, "Old Photographs" stands apart: it is built entirely from Western idioms, opening with an introspective piano theme reminiscent of Schumann before sliding, almost without warning, into a wild, Piazzolla-style tango. That collision of tender nostalgia and untamed passion has made it the best-known excerpt from Constantinople — closely associated with the Gryphon Trio, who recorded the complete work, and taken up since by ensembles including the NZTrio. It now holds a life of its own as a staple of the piano trio repertoire. Anton Arensky (1861–1906) Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 32 Arensky composed this trio in 1894 as a tribute to the cellist Karl Davydov, former director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, who had died five years earlier. Cast in four movements, it opens with a richly Romantic Allegro moderato built on three contrasting themes, music that owes an audible debt to Arensky's friend and mentor Tchaikovsky. A buoyant Scherzo follows, its central trio offering one of the graceful, Slavic-flavored waltzes for which Arensky was known. The slow third movement, "Elegia," is the emotional core of the work: a muted, sorrowful melody passed quietly between cello, violin, and piano in memory of Davydov. The Finale opens with the trio's most dramatic material before recalling themes from the earlier movements on its way to a turbulent close. First performed in Russia by the end of 1894, with Arensky himself at the piano, the trio was an immediate success and has remained one of the best-loved works in the piano trio repertoire ever since.