The Modern Piano Trio
The old three-part conversation proved endlessly renewable: the twentieth century gave the piano trio some of its most colourful and most harrowing masterpieces.
It might have seemed, by 1900, that the piano trio had said everything it had to say. It had not. Freed from the assumption that it must sound like Brahms, twentieth-century composers found in the ensemble a laboratory for new colour, new rhythm and new feeling — and audiences discovered that three instruments could evoke a shimmering impressionist haze one decade and the horror of war the next.
Ravel's jewel
Maurice Ravel completed his Piano Trio in A minor in 1914, racing to finish before he left to serve in the First World War. It is a marvel of sonority: the opening theme has a Basque lilt, the second movement ("Pantoum") borrows the interlocking structure of a Malay verse form, the third is a stately passacaglia, and the finale blazes with light. Ravel makes three instruments sound like a whole orchestra of shifting colour, and the trio is a cornerstone of the modern repertoire. The Encyclopædia Britannica entry sketches his career.
Shostakovich and the weight of history
Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, Op. 67 (1944), is one of the most devastating works in the literature. Written during the war and in memory of a close friend, it opens with a ghostly cello harmonic, drives through a savage scherzo, mounts a funeral passacaglia, and ends with a dance built on Jewish melodic motifs — music that has been heard ever since as a memorial to the victims of the age. It is proof that the intimate piano trio can bear the heaviest historical burdens.
Other modern voices
The century offered much more. The young Erich Wolfgang Korngold announced his prodigious gifts with a richly late-Romantic Piano Trio, Op. 1, written when he was barely a teenager. The American Charles Ives wrote a craggy, memory-haunted trio drawing on college songs and hymn tunes. Later composers across the world have continued to add to the form, ensuring that living ensembles always have new music to set beside the classics. A broad orientation to the period is offered by the chamber-music survey at Britannica.
The Russian elegiac line
One strand deserves particular mention. Following Tchaikovsky's great memorial trio, Russian composers made the piano trio a vehicle for mourning. Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote two Trios élégiaques, the second a vast lament for Tchaikovsky himself; Anton Arensky's D minor trio, also an elegy, became a repertoire staple. That tradition of the commemorative Russian trio runs straight through to the nineteenth-century sources and on to Shostakovich's wartime Second Trio, binding a century of the form together around the idea of music as remembrance.
An unbroken tradition
What unites five centuries — from Haydn's fortepiano to a premiere given tonight — is the particular pleasure of three equal musicians thinking aloud together. The modern works do not replace the old ones; they join them, and the best concerts often set the two in dialogue. To hear the range of it on record, turn to the discography, and to hear it live, to the festivals and chamber-music culture that keep the repertoire alive.