– Composer: Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (25 September 1906 — 9 August 1975)
– Performers: Janine Jansen (violin), Torleif Thedéen (cello), Eldar Nebolsin (piano)
– Year of recording: 2012 (Live, Vredenburg Utrecht, The Netherlands)
Piano Trio No. 1 in C minor, Op. 8, written in 1923.
In one movement, marked “Andante”.
Shostakovich wrote his 1st Piano Trio (originally entitled ‘Poème’) when he was only sixteen, and had already spent three years as a student at the Conservatoire in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was then known). His father had died the previous year, lack of food and heat in post-revolutionary Russia was making life very difficult, and Shostakovich’s already frail health had deteriorated. He contracted tuberculosis of the lymph glands, and underwent an operation shortly before his piano graduation recital, at which he played Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ Sonata with his neck wrapped in bandages. He was then sent to a sanatorium in the Crimea to convalesce, and it was there that he wrote this Piano Trio. He dedicated it to Tatyana Glivenko, a girl with whom he had fallen in love while he was convalescing, and with whom he maintained a warm relationship for several years.
The Piano Trio is in a single movement, cast in a large-scale sonata form, with two contrasted themes, and a development section that rises to climaxes. But more striking than this formal procedure is the range of material that Shostakovich deploys, and the transformation that themes undergo. The opening theme, with its drooping semitones interspersed with yearning leaps, supplies the material for agitated passages, for a spiky, brooding version of the theme (one of the grotesque touches that seems most like the mature Shostakovich), and for a dramatic climax. This is followed by a dreamy second theme, which Shostakovich took from an incomplete piano sonata. Despite this origin, it seems somewhat related to the first theme: the drooping semitones have gone, but the yearning leaps remain. After the dramatic development, which breaks off suddenly, the themes recur in reverse order.
Already, this student work contains recognizable Shostakovich hallmarks: lyrical melodies coloured by acerbic harmonies, sudden contrasts of pace and energy, insistent rhythms, and spare textures giving way to unashamedly romantic passages and powerful climaxes. All of this we can hear as a preparation for his triumphant graduation composition two year later, the First Symphony. The Piano Trio, however, was not published during Shostakovich’s lifetime, and the edition that appeared after his death was assembled from various autograph sources, none of them complete scores. The last twenty-two bars of the piano part were missing, and were supplied by Shostakovich’s pupil, Boris Tishchenko.