Tjeknavorian & Müller-Schott & Vinntskaya

A rather eccentric baroness, she was the heir of her husband’s fortune and a lover of the arts and of music in particular. She travelled around Europe with a sizeable entourage, which even included musicians. On her travels around Switzerland, France, and Italy in the summer of 1880, she was accompanied by an 18-year-old French pianist. He taught the baroness’s children, accompanied his patron at the piano, and also composed. From their correspondence, we can infer that Claude Debussy captivated the baroness both with his virtuosic playing and with his charm.

He wrote his Trio in G major while on that journey, specifically in Tuscany. “Debussy is composing a piano trio just now, drawing upon Masseneta”, writes von Meck in a letter to Tchaikovsky. The composition was long regarded as lost, but in the mid-1980s a sensational discovery was made of the kind that rarely occurs in musicology. The manuscript was found for the first movement of the trio, then eventually for all of the movements in the estate of one of Debussy’s students. “I feel very close to the composition”, says the cellist Daniel Müller-Schott. “When the work was first published in 1986, I was about ten years old. At that time I had begun to play in a piano trio, and that was one of the first compositions that our teachers chose for us”, he recalls. A piece of juvenilia, it takes inspiration not only from Jules Massenet, but also from Robert Schumann and César Franck. Hints of the chief features of Debussy’s future style—highly original harmonies and colours—are already present.

The next summer, Debussy visited Nadezhda von Meck in Russia, where he became acquainted with the latest works by local composers including Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. For Tchaikovsky, her patronage and friendship served as an anchor; without her generous financial support, his life would have turned out quite differently. The Piano Trio in A minor is the only of the works on the programme with a subtitle: “A la mémoire d’un grande artiste” (“In memory of a great artist”). Tchaikovsky wrote it in 1881 and dedicated it to his friend and long-time mentor Nikolai Rubinstein, who had died that year at the age of just 45. This trio is a grand, elegiac work of nearly symphonic dimensions. As is implied by Tchaikovsky’s correspondence with his patroness, he preferred writing orchestral music and operas, and the combination of strings and piano gave him difficulties as a composer. He regarded the sound of the piano as best either by itself, as an accompanimental instrument, or in combination with orchestra. In spite of this, he composed an exceptionally effective work lasting nearly an hour, unconventionally divided into two movements. He makes enormous demands on the performers’ commitment and technical mastery.

The Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor by Johannes Brahms is—like Debussy’s trio—the fruit of the happy months of a summer holiday. The German composer was spending the summer of 1886 by Lake Thun in Switzerland. In just three months he wrote two violin sonatas, once cello sonata, a number of songs, and this trio. By the standards of its composer, this is a brief composition, lasting just 25 minutes. According to Daniel Müller Schott, “Brahms always used to spend summer in natural surroundings, getting inspiration. He was in his 50s, somehow shying away from the thought of writing another symphony, having written four already, and instead focusing on chamber music. He was interested in chamber music’s more intimate expressive quality and structure. The trio is very diverse. It’s very romantic and it’s in the dramatic key of C minor. Brahms combines dark, orchestral material with wonderfully intimate moments. The last movement is very much like a dance, in the manner of the czardas, a Hungarian dance. The Trio in C minor stands at the centre of our programme.”