Czech Chamber Music Society • Lobkowicz Trio

The Czech composer and teacher Otomar Kvěch (1950‒2018) graduated from the State Conservatoire in Prague, where he studied composition (under Jan Zdeněk Bartoš) and organ (Josef Kubáň). From 1969, he studied composition at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague under Jiří Pauer (and under Emil Hlobil for one semester). After graduation, he worked first as a répétiteur at the National Theatre. After that, he served as the head of the composition department at the State Conservatoire in Prague and taught at the Academy of Performing Arts. For many years, he also worked as a director of musical programming and editor at Czechoslovak Radio, and after 1989 as a dramaturge for Czech Radio. Kvěch’s oeuvre encompasses orchestral works, chamber music, a children’s radio opera, choruses, and melodramas.

About his Piano Trio, a youthful work from 1976 full of dramatic, brilliant, and meditative moods built upon chords almost in the style of Messiaen, the composer said: “Who would not gladly look back on the days of youth, a time when everything lay before us, when we refused to acknowledge that there might also be dark moments in live, and when everything could be overcome so easily! I have so many glowing memories bound to my Piano Trio! Those were lovely moments when we were rehearsing for the premiere in Arnošt Střížek’s flat. At the premiere, those fellows played the trio like gods, and their brilliant playing reflected on me as well. Suddenly, a number of adult colleagues began to take me seriously!” Giving the premiere was the New Prague Trio: Jiří Klika (violin), Jan Zvolánek (cello), and Arnošt Střížek (piano). 

The Viennese native Fritz Kreisler (1875‒1962) was one of the most famous violin virtuosos of his day. He entered the Vienna Conservatoire at age seven, then from 1885 until 1887 he studied composition and violin at the Paris Conservatoire, graduating at age 12 and winning the Premier Prix. At age 13 he gave his first concert tour of the United States. He also auditioned for a position in the Vienna Philharmonic, but the concertmaster Arnold Rosé turned him down. As a consequence of this failure, he gave up music for a decade and began studying medicine. In 1899, he returned to the violin, giving his spectacular concert debut with the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Arthur Nikisch. It was this concert and a subsequent tour of America from 1901 to 1903 that brought Kreisler true recognition. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he settled permanently in the USA and became an American citizen in 1943.

Fritz Kreisler composed a number of violin compositions and encores including several pastiches of the music of baroque and classical masters that were long regarded as authentic until Kreisler admitted in 1935 that he had written them himself. He often played in a piano trio with his brother, the cellist Hugo Kreisler, performing nostalgic pieces to bring back to mind the spirit of old Vienna from the days of their youth. The Three Pieces for Piano Trio are arrangements of old Viennese songs, waltzes, and marches, fondly recalling the nostalgic atmosphere of the city on the Danube in the glory days of ballrooms, top hats, tailcoats, corsets, and carriages. The Old Refrain is a popular Viennese song, and Londonderry Air, an Irish folk melody from County Londonderry, is regarded as the anthem of Northern Ireland. The melody is also familiar from the song “Danny Boy”. The Marche Miniature Viennoise evokes visions of parades with Austro-Hungarian policemen and military officers in caps adorned with bird plumage. The individual pieces exude the spirit and Old-World noblesse of a time that once was but will never return…

Already as a child, Johannes Brahms (1833‒1897) had begun helping to supplement the family budget by playing the piano with his father in Hamburg’s pubs and dance halls. At the same time, he began to exhibit his extraordinary talent as a pianist, and from 1849 his talent at composing as well. For the young Brahms, 1853 was a year of key importance. That was when he met the violinist Eduard Reményi and went on his first concert tour with him, during which in Hannover, Reményi introduced Brahms to the violinist Joseph Joachim, who was two years his elder. A lifelong friendship developed between Brahms and Joachim. On 30 September 1853 Brahms and Joachim made their first visit to the married couple Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf. After Brahms showed them his first compositions, Robert Schumann wrote an article in his periodical Neue Zeitschrift für Musik titled Neue Bahnen (New Paths), in which he foretold a great future for Brahms. He also recommended the young composer to the publisher Breitkopf und Härtel.

Brahms’s most important composition representing this happy period of his search for and discovery of promising prospects is the Piano Trio in B major, Op. 8. Today, it is Brahms’s earliest preserved chamber work. The composer himself destroyed all of his earlier chamber music besides the scherzo from the FAE Sonata (a collective work with individual movements composed by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Albert Dietrich). Only the Trio in B Major remains as an authentic example of Brahms’s early chamber music. The work was premiered on 13 October 1855 in Danzig (Gdansk). The four-movement trio is full of beautiful melodic ideas. Years later, the composer’s lifelong friend Clara Schumann had difficulty accepting the fact that in 1889 Brahms subjected the composition to a thorough revision, so that the result was a very different composition. He wrote to her: “The first movement has been cut down to about half of its original length, and the second and third movements by one-third. In the first and final movements, I have replaced the second themes with entirely new ones, I have removed the long fugue from the first movement, in the Adagio I have deleted the central Allegro section, and I have omitted all quotes of songs by Beethoven and Schubert from the Finale.” The Trio in B major is Brahms’s only work published in two different authorised versions, and today nearly everyone plays the revised second version, which is characterised by its greater wealth of thematic and motivic elaboration (something typical of the mature, not the young Brahms). It is also one of the few multi-movement works to begin in a major key and end in the parallel minor (another example is the Italian Symphony by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy).

As Arnold Schoenberg wrote, the opening theme of Brahms’s Piano Trio No. 1 is “the initial thought of the piece, which in turn, acts as the generator for all subsequent musical events.” The Scherzo has a lively, rhythmic main theme, while the contrasting Trio section offers a moment of relief and uses folk inspiration. The Adagio third movement leaves a lasting impression thanks to the soulful cello melody in the middle section. The concluding Allegro is exciting and dramatic. The major-key second theme brightens the atmosphere somewhat, but the composition still drives ahead to its triumphant (minor-key) ending.