The Complete Piano Trios - Volume 1

Abstract

There is a tendency today to regard Brahma primarily as a eornposer of symphonies, but we may well wonder why. His symphonies were certainly landmarks in the development of form, but the whole range of his chamber music — and there is much more of this — exhibits the same stylistic features. It is possible lo suggest that his chamber works have symphonic cast and that their scale is generally imposing. Few composers have succeeded in extracting so much sound as Brahms from three instruments: piano, violin and cello. This does not stem entirely from his invariably mealy piano parts, bill also from his instinctive feeling for the registers wilhin which the violin and cello produce their richest lone. He left three works for this combination: there is also a fourth work, the authenticity of which has long been disputed. The disputed trio is in A major (BIS-CD-99), and il has been a fruitful object of musicological wrangling, even if most experts now seem agreed thai it is genuine. In a letter to Schumann in 185:!, Brahms mentioned thai he had already composed several trios, and when he destroyed a large number of youthful works in 1885 he made no mention of any trio being included among them. From this, one may conclude that at least one piano trio must have: been in existence in 1885. In 1924 the German musicologist Ernst Bucken found a manuscript from the 1860s, in which an unknown copyist had transcribed the A major Tno. The main cause for doubting its authenticity was the fact that die title page had been cut away and that no information about the composer was supplied. But after painstaking stylistic analysis il was decided that the work could, with considerable confidence, be assigned ro Brahms.