Repertoire Notes
The concert starts with a cheeky and humorous piece featuring, in the last movement, a tune from an opera by an Austrian composer, Jospeh Weigl. This catchy tune, ‘Pria ch’io l’impegno’, translates to ‘Before I go to work I must have something to eat’. It was a widespread hit in Vienna around 1797 and led to the trio’s nickname, the Gassenhauer (street hit), because the melody was so popular it was sung and whistled in the ‘gassen’ (lanes) of Vienna. This light hearted inspiration is very rare for the usually very serious Beethoven who incapsulates this tune in an old style form, the theme and variations, in order to build an extremely smart construction where he ‘hides’ the actual tune for several variations (the entire point should be to present the theme and then to vary it) until he reintroduces it bit by bit rushing toward the end. Poulenc to me is the supreme master of mélodies in the 20th century. He was an extremely eclectic musician who composed widely in other forms and genres – chamber music, symphonic but also for the theatre as well as for the church. What I love about him is that he had little use for the dogmas of his century and instead he accepted other influences, such jazz and neo-Classicism. The clarinet sonata is a late work with a dramatic and sassy opening Allegro tristamente, followed by the gentle lament of the second movement, Romanza. The concluding Allegro con fuoco is bright and brittle with a circus-like energy and one of Poulenc’s wistfully melodies. Like much of Bartók’s music, the two violin rhapsodies are based on the folk music that he spent much of his time travelling through Hungary collecting with note pad and tape recorder. The second one, performed in this concert, is the wildest and features an almost improvisatory feel, with constant variations in the melodies and multiple stops of the sort that would be natural for a player creating his own harmonies as he goes along.
The concert ends with the second piano trio by Mendelssohn, unjustly less famous than his first in D minor. The work is dark and starts with a turbulent motion in the piano that recalls his orchestral works, the Hebrides overture and his Scottish Symphony. The second movement is a dreamy song without words on a gently rocky rhythm of a barcarola (Venetian boat songs). The third movement is one of those quick and spirited scherzos that are the trademark of Mendelssohn’s light yet devilish aesthetic. Described by Mendelssohn himself as ‘a trifle nasty to play’, its high energy has been likened to that of the scherzo of his A Midsummer Night’s Dream . The last movement is probably the most known of the trio where the composer quotes the choral Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ , (used also by Bach) and then expands to also include a 16-century Genevan psalter tune, known in English as Old Hundredth from its association with the Psalm 100 ( William Kethe ), as the culminating melody. Umberto Clerici
Credits
Clarinet Tommaso Lonquich Cello Umberto Clerici Piano Claudio Martinez Mehner Violin Júlia Pusker
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