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Many composers have discovered that the combination of piano, violin and cello is notoriously difficult to balance, and have struggled with the problem of giving full scope to each instrument without drowning the cello in its lower register, or letting the piano dominate the ensemble. Shostakovich, who had a perfect ear for instrumental textures, enjoyed confronting such challenges and composed two true piano trios at the beginning and middle of his career, and one piano trio with soprano (the Alexander Blok Romances) at the end. The three could hardly be more different in sound, texture and general effect.
The C minor Piano Trio was only published after Shostakovich’s death. He began it in August 1923 in the Crimea, where he was convalescing, and completed it soon afterwards in Petrograd. He dedicated the piece (which he also called Poème) to Tatyana Glivenko, an early love. It was first performed by the composer and two of his friends in December: Shostakovich’s younger sister recalled that they practised in a cinema and their sessions often doubled as an accompaniment to silent films. We can only imagine what the audience thought. The Trio comes from the time when Shostakovich was just seventeen, clearly the most brilliant student at the Petrograd Conservatory, and beginning to collect ideas for the symphony which three years later would bring him widespread attention in Russia and eventually international fame. It was a period when he was experimenting with a number of different musical approaches and in this work he was obviously determined to avoid any reference to a nineteenth-century piano trio sound. Shostakovich was a child of the revolution (however ironically he may have viewed it) and wanted to compose original music for an original society. The Trio is a compact work in a single movement, but containing a wide variety of tempos and musical characters in its well-crafted span.
The stimulus to write his Piano Quintet came to Shostakovich from the musicians of the Beethoven String Quartet, who had asked him for a work which they could all play together. It was his first major composition after the Sixth Symphony; he worked on it during the summer of 1940 and gave the first performance with the Beethoven Quartet in Moscow on 23 November that year. Shostakovich would certainly have been aware that he was composing in a medium which presents huge problems of balance and texture, and which even the most devoted composers of chamber music in the twentieth century have tended to ignore. That he so completely overcame these problems indicates not only the seriousness with which he approached the task, but more significantly the originality and inventiveness of his aural imagination: once this music has been heard, it is unthinkable to imagine it played by any other combination of instruments. The work is scored very economically; the full quintet is rarely employed (apart from in the frantic Scherzo) and the wide range of instrumental effects includes such expedients as frequently having the piano play at the very top or very bottom of its register, making a musical virtue of its notorious inability to blend well with stringed instruments.
The Prelude establishes three expressive areas — dramatic rhetoric, neo-classical dance rhythms and intense lyricism — and announces the scale on which the Quintet will evolve. Its themes are all found embryonically in this Prelude, and all of the subsequent movements quote from its first few bars in the most subtly different contexts. Unlike so many other Russian composers who have fought shy of extended counterpoint, Shostakovich demonstrates in the second movement how natural a means of expression it is for him, and how much emotional charge can be generated by the traditional scholarly devices associated with fugue. Nothing could be less scholarly in its impact, however, than the ensuing Scherzo, cheerfully poised between spiky wit and downright bad manners. It is something of a shock when the Intermezzo reestablishes seriousness. Despite its title, this is no lightweight interlude but a deep expression of the sombre currents which run through the Quintet. The formal weight of a sonata structure is reserved for the Finale. Its development section climaxes in an impassioned reference to the Prelude, but the recapitulation is surprisingly condensed, and the clownish second subject has barely re-appeared before the music thins out and brings itself to a close with a wryly conventional gesture. (Andrew Huth)

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
1) Applause [0.20]
2) Piano Trio No.1 in C Minor, op.8 [11.33]
Five Pieces for 2 violins and piano
3) I Prelude [2.44]
4) II Gavotte [1.38]
5) III Elegy [2.49]
6) IV Waltz [1.50]
7) V Polka [1.33]
Piano Quintet in G minor, op.57
8) I Prelude [4.21]
9) II Fugue [10.20]
10) III Scherzo [3.13]
11) IV Intermezzo – [6.52]
12) V Finale [7.19]
13) Applause [0.38]

Julian Rachlin, violin I
Janine Jansen, violin II
Yuri Bashmet, viola
Mischa Maisky, cello
Itamar Golan, piano

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