2023 04 29-30 Ragged Music Festival ENG - Website

Programme notes
Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s strong aversion to piano trios is well documented; in fact he couldn’t
stand the idea of an ensemble comprising a string instrument and piano (as opposed to a
piano in an accompanying role). On a number of occasions, he expressly refused to write
a trio, yet it was precisely this formation that he chose for a memorial tribute to his very
dear colleague and friend, Nikolai Rubinstein. It’s as if he wanted to augment his pain.
On the day of Tchaikovsky’s death, some
twelve years later, Rachmaninov began
writing his D minor trio in Memory of the
Great Artist. Rachmaninov, in his turn,
was granted a memorial trio in 1943 by
Alexander Goldenweiser – more celebrated
as a music teacher than a composer – and
a year later Shostakovich wrote his E
minor trio in memory of his close friend
Ivan Sollertinsky. The first in this mournful
sequence, Tchaikovsky’s work is possibly
the greatest and the most original. As often
with Tchaikovsky, it is the amazing synergy
of very unorthodox ideas and relatively
simple, classical means that make the work
soar. It exists as if in two different planes:
the first movement in the earthly one, with
its overwhelming waves of passion and
suffering, ecstasy and despair; and the
variations – in the heavenly plane, pure,
enchanted, but increasingly alienating in its
beauty as the work progresses. In some way,
this shimmering and shining celestial world
is not dissimilar to Mahler’s Das himmlische
Leben of the 4th Symphony, even though
Tchaikovsky’s solution for the ending of the
piece is resolutely – one may say, typically! –
non-Mahlerian.
On the very border of the unknown
The Ophelia songs are in line with the other
settings of crumbling disintegrating psyche
by Strauss, notably Salomé and Elektra. It is
a curious collection; fragile and almost jewellike,
at the same time they are fine studies
exploring the limits of tonality (particularly
in the second song), of the world familiar
and organic to Strauss; they carefully tiptoe
on the very border of the unknown. There
is an unusual link between this set and the
following song that occurred without us
planning it. While Ophelia’s bitterness due
to her lover’s broken promise (second in the
set) begins with the words ‘Guten Morgen’,
the song Morgen! itself, written over twenty
years before, belongs to the set of songs
composed by Strauss for his wife Pauline
de Ahna as a wedding gift. One of Strauss’
most beloved masterpieces it is a true
miracle of great, elegiac beauty. It consists
of paradoxes: brief and very economically
written, it feels infinite and majestically vast;
its euphoric greeting is set in the bittersweet
tone of a farewell; and the qualities of
musical language itself are peculiarly
reminiscent of a late style – perhaps, most of
all, of the language of the Four Last Songs.
A realm of shadows
We devised our festival program as an
exploration of transience, the theme of
transformation and transition from the
familiar into the unknown. Alfred Schnittke, a
somewhat Faustian figure in the XX century
34