Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano in C major, Hob. XV:27

Haydn was a prodigious and innovative Austrian composer of the late Classical period.  He is credited with the development of the symphony, the string quartet and the string trio.  He was a major contributor to the sonata form, the most important principle of musical form well into the 20th century.  His efforts earned him the appellations “Father of the Symphony” and “Father of the String Quartet.” For much of his career, Haydn was the most celebrated composer in Europe.  Working in cultural isolation as a court musician for the noble Esterházy family in Hungary, he was, as he put it, “forced to become original.” 

His trio for Violin, Cello and Piano in C major is catalogued as his 43rd trio of a total of 45, of which 31 were piano trios.  It was the first of three trios he dedicated to Theresa Jansen Bartolozzi, an eminent pianist living in London at the end of the 18th century.  Consequently, the piano part is one of the most demanding Haydn composed.  It was published in 1797 at a time when most chamber music was written for amateur musicians to be performed in intimate settings.  Full of humor and elegance, the trio charmed Felix Mendelssohn some 40 years later.  After a performance of the trio in which he played the piano part, he wrote to his sister Fanny, “The people couldn’t get over their astonishment that such a lovely thing could exist.”  

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), Sonata for Violin and Piano, No. 2 in G major

Widely regarded as France’s greatest composer during the 1920s and 1930s, Maurice Ravel is considered, along with Claude Debussy, the leading Impressionist composer (although neither cared for that term).  Ravel was branded a rebel by the establishment of the Paris Conservatory, who expelled him from Gabriel Fauré’s composition class.  The good-natured Fauré recognized his student’s genius and allowed him to remain in the class as an auditor.  Ravel drew inspiration from French composers from the 17th-century to his Fauré, incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and jazz into his compositions.  He was particularly renowned for his skill with orchestration.  

Ravel composed his Sonata for Violin and Piano between 1923 and 1927, at a time when he was becoming enamored with American jazz.  During this time, W. C. Handy’s blues band was in France introducing jazz and blues to adoring crowds in Paris, and these influences showed up in the violin sonata (the second of the three-movement work is entitled “Blues”).  “The most captivating part of jazz,” he said, “is its rich and diverting rhythm….  Jazz is a very rich and vital source of inspiration for modern composers.”  The following year Ravel would travel to New York, where he celebrated his 53rd birthday.  During the party he met a young George Gershwin. The two composers became instant friends and spent several evenings together in Harlem at the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club hearing some of jazz’s greatest musicians and soaking up the American sound. 

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano in C major, Op. 87

Romantic German composer and pianist Johannes Brahms is frequently grouped with Beethoven and Bach as one of the “Three B’s” of classical music.  Part traditionalist and part innovator, he composed symphonies, chamber music, concertos, music for solo piano, voice and chorus.  He was a friend and protégé of Robert and Clara Schumann, who were instrumental in the development of his early career, and Clara served as his most trusted critic.  After Robert’s death in 1857, he and Clara remained close until her death in 1896.  He was also a friend of legendary violinist Joseph Joachim, who described his first meeting with the younger musician: “Never in the course of my artist’s life have I been more completely overwhelmed.”   

Brahms’ powerful four-movement piano trio, the second of three he would write, was composed between 1880 and 1882 at the pinnacle of his creative power—between his second and third symphonies and around the same time as his two great overtures, theAcademic Festival and the Tragic. After writing the first movement, the trio was shelved as he focused on his second piano concerto and the third symphony.  He returned to the trio some two years later and showed the first movement to his friend Clara Schumann, who admired its fluid thematic evolution and phrase structure.  The emboldened composer told his publisher that they had “not yet had such a beautiful trio” from him and “very likely have not published its equal in the last ten years.”  James Keller wrote that the trio is full of  “noble, triumphant, heart-swelling joy . . . .”(Chamber Music: A Listener’s Guide, P. 118).    

Program notes by Sara Grossman