Czech Chamber Music Society • Trio Zimbalist

The composer, pianist, writer and artist Lera Auerbach was born in Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains, an industrial city that produced weapons, including nuclear ones, where nuclear waste is being processed up to this day. Auerbach’s musical talent became apparent very early on. At the age of eight she performed with an orchestra for the first time, and at twelve she wrote the opera Snow Maidenʼs Gift. She won numerous piano competitions and in 1991 participated in a competition in the United States. There she felt the air of artistic freedom and decided to stay. That same year, her brother, a mathematician, won a position at the University of Toronto, and eventually her parents joined her in the United States.

Lera Auerbach studied composition and piano at the Julliard School, and made her debut in 2002 at Carnegie Hall, performing her own Suite for Violin, Piano and Orchestra with violinist Gidon Kremer conducting the Kremerata Baltica. She has composed the ballets The Little Mermaid and Tatiana (based on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin), the opera Gogol (premiered in Vienna in 2011), the requiem Dresden – Ode to Peace (premiered in Dresden in 2012), instrumental concertos and six symphonies. She has won awards for both her compositions (such as the Hindemith Prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival) and her literary works: in 1996 the International Pushkin Society awarded her the title “Writer of the Year”. Lera Auerbach writes in Russian, which connects her to her native homeland, claims her Jewish roots and, as she says, chooses and accepts from the culture what corresponds to her nature. At present, she is the artist-in-residence in piano at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna.

Auerbach’s chamber music includes eleven string quartets and five piano trios. Piano Trio No. 1, Op. 28, came into being between 1992 and 1994; its premiere took place in June 1999 in Schwetzingen, performed by Vadim Gluzman (house), Wendy Warner (cello) and Angela Yoffe (piano). The composer draws on the legacy of classical music and its forms, but this does not prevent her from exploring new sounds and colors; indeed, her personal style is characterized by them. The first movement, Prelude, is aptly entitled because the motoric movement in the piano that opens the piece and is taken over by the strings is reminiscent of Bach’s Preludes, while the cello plays another motif. The strings’ parts use various techniques such as sul ponticello (with the bow kept near the bridge) and pizzicato, while glissandos are meant to sound like “the cry of seagulls”. The first movement ends in pianissimo. Andante lamentoso, as its title suggests, forms a strong contrast to the first movement with the melancholic sound of the piano and the strings conjuring up a dreamy atmosphere. The final movement brings another sharp contrast with a vigorous entrance of the piano that allows the strings to be swept away. In its middle section there is a pause for a moment before all three instruments come together in an energetic conclusion.

Mieczysław Weinberg’s work has been rediscovered by the world in recent years. Until a few years ago his name was almost unknown, although he composed over two dozen symphonies, instrumental concertos, numerous chamber works and songs, and operas. The 2010 performance of his opera La Passagère at the Bregenz Festival was a major event, and his 1991 Moscow opera The Idiot, based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, was one of the flagship productions of this year’s Salzburg Festival. Two years ago, Weinberg’s Symphony No. 21 “Kaddish” was presented in Prague. Weinberg was born into a Polish-Jewish family in Warsaw. All his life he feared continued anti-Jewish pogroms and Nazi anti-Semitism, from which he fled to Belarus where he settled in Minsk. When the war caught up with him there two years later, he fled to Uzbekistan (none of the family that remained in Warsaw survived). Even after the end of the war, Weinberg lived in constant danger, monitored by Stalin’s secret police, and could not escape new manifestations of anti-Semitism. He found a lifelong friend in Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he considered his teacher, although he never took lessons from him. 

Weinberg’s Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 24 from 1945 is filled with expressively rich music full of rhythmic, almost ferocious tension and emotionally charged lyricism. At the beginning of the first movement, the listener is swept away by the piano vigorously taking over other instruments in delay, followed by elegiac tones and a quiet, slow march. Toccata of the second movement is dictated by the tempo and the rhythm; the atmosphere of the third movement, Poem, is entirely in line with its title. The final movement features rapidly changing moods that range from the grotesque to deep sadness.

Antonín Dvořák created in total six pieces scored for piano trio. The first two trios have not survived, the other four belong to the staples of the concert repertoire. Piano Trio “Dumky”, Op. 90 was composed between 1890 and 1891. Its source of inspiration was folk music, as was often the case with Dvořák. This time – in his “Slavonic period” – Dvořák exploited the contrast between the dreaminess and the exuberance of the Ukrainian form of song called dumka, which he also applied, for example, in his Sextet, Op. 48 or String Quartet in E flat major, Op. 88. However, the Piano Trio, Op. 90 does not contain just one movement with the character of a dumka, but it is a sequence of six essentially independent pieces of this type.

The premiere of “Dumky” was given on 11 April 1891 at a concert organized by the Town Community Center in Prague to celebrate the honorary doctorate awarded to Dvořák by Charles University, with Ferdinand Lachner playing the violin part, Hanuš Wihan on the cello and Dvořák himself on the piano. “Dumky” was also part of an extended concert tour which Dvořák took to bid farewell to his homeland before sailing to the United States. The trio quickly became known to the public and was received with enthusiasm throughout the Czech lands. Dvořák tried to promote it in the world by offering it to the London publisher Novello, but was rejected. As a result, it got published in 1894 by the Berlin publisher Simrock.

One of the first places where Dvořák’s new music was eagerly expected was Vienna, where the “Dumky” was first performed on 5 March 1895 by a trio consisting of Marie Baumayer (piano), Arnold Rosé (violin) and Reinhold Hummer (cello). The Viennese music critic and a Dvořák fan, Eduard Hanslik, was surprised by the work’s strange form this time: “There are attractive numbers, but in sum they do not leave any overall impression. Each dumka is itself conflicted, suddenly moving from grief to glee, and the listener must undergo twelve abrupt changes of mood in the course of six short pieces. There is no inner coherence that would unite the six dumky. [...] The arrangement into a trio seems to be done on a whim, but it shall not be disputed since this particular form has brought us so much excellent and charming music.” Dvořák himself repeatedly described the “Dumky” as difficult and “very tricky to perform”. However, because of its engaging temperament and emotionality, “Dumky” is the most popular of all Dvořák’s trios both with performers and audiences.