Classical CD Review: Shostakovich & Arensky Piano Trios

By Jonathan Blumhofer

A mightily played, deeply felt, and finely recorded album from Trio Con Brio.

Trio Con Brio Copenhagen’s new album pairs a set of strongly contrasting, but not entirely dissimilar, piano trios by Anton Arensky and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Though their lives almost overlapped — Arensky died seven months to the day before Shostakovich was born — the composers hailed from wildly different worlds: the elder was a Romantic from Tsarist Russia; the younger, a conflicted son of the Soviet Revolution. Yet their music, placed side-by-side, shares more than a few commonalities, broad issues of style and treatment of dissonance aside.

Both knew how to craft warm, lyrical lines. Each appreciated the power of strong contrasts of character, dynamics, texture, and mood. And neither shied away from furiously virtuosic — but still highly idiomatic — instrumental writing.

Arensky’s D-minor Piano Trio offers all of the above. Its four movements sing, seethe, and dance. In Trio Con Brio’s performance here, this 1894 score comes across as a surging, passionate essay, marked by rubato phrasings and moments of bold intensity. There’s lots of character, too, from the first movement’s volatile climaxes to the Scherzo’s woozy Trio and the finale’s tempestuous coda.

Throughout, the ensemble’s reading, though occasionally a bit throaty, is brilliantly executed. Jens Elvekjaer’s account of the keyboard part is wonderfully fluent and articulate, while the string playing of violinist Soo-Jin Hong and cellist Soo-Kyung Hong is remarkably uniform in tone, nowhere more so than in the luminous reprise of the third movement’s opening theme.

Both of Shostakovich’s Trios — the First dates from 1923 and the Second from 1944 — channel some of the Romantic gestures of Arensky’s era. But there’s often an arch, if not ironic or downright bitter, quality to these allusions.

In his youthful initial effort, Shostakovich’s writing — sweeping themes, explosive contrasts of dynamics, driving episodes of bravura pianism — is often tinged with impish dissonance.

The present performance certainly draws out the playfulness of the music’s fast sections (Elvekjaer, again, nails the athletic piano part). But Trio Con Brio also mines plenty of soul and depth out of its songful materials. The central Andante, for instance, is serene, the coda fervent.

Shostakovich’s Trio no. 2, on the other hand, hails from the depths of the Great Patriotic War. Its rigorously contrapuntal first movement (which opens with a ghostly melody for cello playing in stratospheric harmonics) is followed by a furious, mechanistic Scherzo and sober Passacaglia before culminating in a harrowing set of variations on a Jewish melody.

Here Trio Con Brio ably captures the delirious, disorienting nature of so much of Shostakovich’s writing in the piece. The first movement is well shaped and paced, its motivic ideas all clearly expressed. They observe the second’s dynamic swells scrupulously; as a result, the movement heaves like a heavy sea. Mournful, bent notes in the Passacaglia presage more of the same in the finale, which turns on a dime from playful and balletic at the start to fierce and sarcastic just a few bars in.

Yet for all the irony, irreverence, and anguish Trio Con Brio’s reading turns up (especially during the finale), theirs is a performance of this Trio that’s ultimately rooted in the music’s humanity. The end is tragic and exhausting, yes; but there’s a genuine sense of emotional accomplishment having made it to this point.

Granted, that’s maybe not the most uplifting way of describing what is a mightily played, deeply felt, and finely recorded album. Still, this is all honest music, much of which flowed from hard lived experience and now comes into a world no less dysfunctional and broken. Accordingly, there’s something paradoxically comforting about this album: it reminds us that there’s nothing new under the sun.


Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

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