DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1906
Died in Moscow, 1975
Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67 (1944)
Dmitri Shostakovich had his first run-in with Joseph Stalin in 1936, when the young composer was blasted for producing “Muddle Instead of Music,” to quote the title of a scathing editorial. Stalin’s tight control over Soviet artists relaxed slightly during World War II, and Shostakovich took advantage of that leeway to compose one of his most personal and provocative works during a stay in 1944 at an artist’s retreat far away from the front lines.
In the Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Shostakovich channeled the pain of having recently lost a dear friend and mentor. The austere opening section points to his affinity with the refined counterpoint of Bach, augmented here by the unexpected color of artificial harmonics, sending the cello high into the pitch spectrum, above the violin. The second movement is a quintessential example of Shostakovich toeing the line between exuberance and sarcasm in spirited dance music, followed by a solemn slow movement.
The trio’s longest and most astonishing movement is its finale, filled with Hebraic themes that serve as a tribute to a Jewish student who had recently died in the battle for Leningrad, and perhaps as an unspoken memorial for the broader fate of Jews in Europe and the Soviet Union. In the memoir Testimony as transcribed by Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich is quoted as saying, “Jewish folk music can seem cheerful and in reality be deeply tragic. Almost always it is laughter under tears. This characteristic comes very close to my concept of music. Music must always contain two strata. The Jews have so long been tormented that they have learnt to conceal their despair. They express it in dance music. All genuine folk music is beautiful, but the Jewish is unique.” There’s a long-running debate among scholars as to whether Testimony is authentic or fabricated, but either way Shostakovich’s music itself, similarly multilayered and uniquely beautiful, speaks to his affinity for Jewish folk traditions.
JOHN ZORN
Born September 2, 1953, in New York City
Resides in New York City
Philosophical Investigations II (2024)]
As a saxophonist, composer, and bandleader with an insatiable curiosity and tireless work ethic, John Zorn conquered New York’s avant-garde jazz scene by the mid-’80s, and he has never left the cutting edge since then. Some of his most high-profile work has been with his bands, including Masada and Naked City, but his channels for making and distributing music have always been more varied than just the traditional jazz musician’s life of performing in clubs. Zorn founded the record label Tzadik and has released hundreds of his own recordings on it, and he opened the downtown venue The Stone as an outlet for the scene of experimental and improvised music that has lost most of its niche performance spaces to rising rents and gentrification.
Zorn is just as eclectic in his work as a composer of concert music, with highlights including the downright zany Cat o’ Nine Tails written for the Kronos Quartet in 1988, and a set of unexpectedly earnest Orchestral Variations written for the New York Philharmonic in 1998 (in memory of Leonard Bernstein). Zorn wrote a previous work for the Junction Trio, titled Philosophical Investigations and premiered at Roulette in 2023 as part of a series celebrating his 70th birthday. He has followed up with Philosophical Investigations II, which like its predecessor borrows the title from a book by the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The score labels the piece a “language game,” an idea that Wittgenstein postulated in his book, in essence noting that the meaning of language is dependent on its context, and that words are defined based on how they are used. This philosophy aligns very well with Zorn’s approach to music, which delights in abrupt transitions and collisions that shape the meaning of the material at play, including frequent quotations from other composers (sometimes literal, sometimes subliminal). In this piano trio, the ghost of Brahms informs a sometimes absurd and ultimately touching dialogue with the Romantic tradition.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born in Hamburg, 1833
Died in Vienna, 1897
Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, Op. 8 (1853-54, rev. 1889)
When Brahms, at the age of 20, first composed his Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, he was practicing an art form rooted more in the past than in the present. His early work looked to the examples of his dear friends and mentors, Robert and Clara Schumann, who each wrote important trios for piano, violin, and cello. Beyond those immediate precedents, Brahms honored the lineage that stretched from Haydn and Mozart, through Beethoven and Schubert, and on to Mendelssohn, a good friend to the Schumanns and a strong influence on their chamber music sensibilities.
Forty-five years later, Brahms decided to revisit his First Piano Trio. “It will not be so wild as it was before,” Brahms wrote to his old friend Clara, and the 1889 version indeed tightened certain structures and switched out several themes. He kept the warm and amorous melody at the start of the Allegro con brio first movement, for instance, but he paired it with a new contrasting theme, its coy intervals and dry rhythms countering the songlike extroversion of the first theme.
In the scherzo that comes next, frisky outer sections in B-minor recall Mendelssohn’s bewitching scherzos, contrasted against a central trio section in B-major. In the Adagio that follows, the same radiant key returns for the placid, hymn-like entrance. The conflict between B-minor and B-major plays out in the finale as well, ending with a turbulent burst in the minor key, one of the more “wild” details that Brahms preserved in the revision.
© 2024 Aaron Grad