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Tchaikovsky & Juon
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Paul Juon

Tchaikovsky & Juon

Boulanger Trio

Label: CAvi
Format: CD
Barcode: 4260085534012
barcode
Catalog number: AVI 8553401
Releasedate: 07-09-18

- The Boulanger Trio counts as one of the leading and established Piano Trio formation in Europe
- The Russian composer Paul Juon, born into a family of half Scottishmother and an immigrated Swiss father from Grison emigrated backto Switzerland, wrote the Litaniae Op. 70 which creates new sound colours in the tradition of Tchaikovsky
- Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio counts as one of the late Romantic master pieces, which the composer worked within a very short time to mourn about his friend and teacher Anton Rubinstein who died 1881.

“In Juon’s piano trio”, as the members of the Boulanger Trio find, “we plunge into the most profound recesses of the soul. Everything acquires existential significance. This work truly captivates us: so much occurs within such brief moments”. This is where our performers find a bridge that connects Juon’s kaleidoscopic tone poem with PETER TCHAIKOVSKY’s colossal Piano Trio, op. 50, a musical epitaph for pianist and conductor Nikolai Rubinstein, who had been Tchaikovsky’s friend and mentor.


Rubinstein had ensured that the young Tchaikovsky was allowed to enter the newly founded Moscow Conservatory while taking him up as a resident in his own home. “He looked after my every need like a child’s nurse”, Tchaikovsky wrote to his family in Saint Petersburg. Rubinstein not only made sure
that Tchaikovsky wore appropriately elegant clothing, but he took him to the opera and to concerts while introducing him to his circle of colleagues and friends, playing out his connections to draw their attention to his protégé’s compositions.

His unexpected passing in 1881, when he was only 45, must have profoundly shattered the young Tchaikovsky, who dedicated the only piano trio he ever
wrote to his late friend, adding the subtitle À la mémoire d’un grand artiste.

The work consists of only two monumental, thematically related movements. Beginning with a heartfelt cello cantilena, the first one is an extensive elegy or Pezzo elegiaco: an immense variety of musical ideas flow together in this sonata form with exposition, development, and reprise. The second movement consists in a seemingly endless set of variations. According to his friend Nikolai Kashkin, Tchaikovsky wanted to “paint a musical portrait of Rubinstein in different phases of his life”.

Whether that be true or not, this is indeed a musical broadsheet of illustrated character variations. Particular mention can be made of the third variation, a brilliant piano caprice, the fifth, where the piano imitates bell chimes, the sixth in form of a waltz, and the elaborate fugue in the eighth. The twelfth variation-cum-finale sets in powerfully and energetically, but harks back to the first movement by concluding with a poignant funeral march.

Chief Vienna music critic Eduard Hanslick found that Tchaikovsky’s trio, despite “a number of original traits and successful turns of phrase”, belonged to the kind of “quasi-suicidal compositions that destroy their own effect because of their merciless length”. Today, however, it is regarded as one of
the milestones in the genre of chamber music with piano.