Rachmaninoff : Trios avec piano n°1 et n°2 - Trio Kobalt

Description

Serge Rachmaninoff's Piano Trios No. 1 and No. 2 highlight two works in which the piano forms the dramatic axis rather than mere support. The First Trio, conceived in a single movement, dialogues with the Pezzo elegiaco of Tchaikovsky's Trio op. 50 and hints, in a retrograde watermark, at an echo of the initial call of the Concerto op. 23. The Second Trio arises from the mourning of Tchaikovsky and takes up the dedication "to the memory of a great artist": a vast architecture that unfolds between sonata form, large-scale theme and variations, and a cyclic conclusion. Revised several times by the composer, the score is presented here in the late 1917 version, with the ad libitum repeats omitted to preserve the continuity of the discourse. In both works, the elegiac and funereal mode feeds on the oscillation between major and minor, a true theater of successive shadows.