Intégrale des trios pour piano

Description

Two works from the 1930s – playful, happy even in nostalgia (the andantino of the Bergerettes, a marvel!), where Martinu makes bows and keyboard dance – and two trios in three movements written almost one after the other in 1950/1951: here is the brief corpus finally assembled on a single CD. The most popular work remains the Bergerettes, with their lively language and folk flavors: played on tiptoe, as fleet-footed as they are here, they are impossible to resist; the blend of the driving keyboard and the darting string figures is achieved with an enthusiastic perfection that, almost incidentally, demands formidable virtuosity. But the five brief pieces of the Trio in D minor are just as demanding, with writing that often turns to polytonality, futuristic works in the 1930s catalog of which the Trio Smetana reveals all the radicalism. Once the war was over, this nostalgia that seemed to lie even behind Martinu’s most joyful music came to the fore, often heart-rending. The two Trios of the 1950s move toward the dark, with an almost Beethovenian eloquence; they must be sung from within, the highly tense lyricism of the Second moving away from the popular music that still animates the First, a fine example of that imaginary folklore that became the composer’s musical ideal (Discophilia - Artalinna.com). (Jean-Charles Hoffelé)