“In Juon’s piano trio”, as the members of the Boulanger Trio find, “we plunge into the most profound recesses of the soul. Everything acquires existential significance. This work truly captivates us: so much occurs within such brief moments”. This is where our performers find a bridge that connects Juon’s kaleidoscopic tone poem with PETER TCHAIKOVSKY’s colossal Piano Trio, op. 50, a musical epitaph for pianist and conductor Nikolai Rubinstein, who had been Tchaikovsky’s friend and mentor.
Rubinstein had ensured that the young Tchaikovsky was allowed to enter the newly founded Moscow Conservatory while taking him up as a resident in his own home. “He looked after my every need like a child’s nurse”, Tchaikovsky wrote to his family in Saint Petersburg. Rubinstein not only made sure
that Tchaikovsky wore appropriately elegant clothing, but he took him to the opera and to concerts while introducing him to his circle of colleagues and friends, playing out his connections to draw their attention to his protégé’s compositions.
His unexpected passing in 1881, when he was only 45, must have profoundly shattered the young Tchaikovsky, who dedicated the only piano trio he ever
wrote to his late friend, adding the subtitle À la mémoire d’un grand artiste.
The work consists of only two monumental, thematically related movements. Beginning with a heartfelt cello cantilena, the first one is an extensive elegy or Pezzo elegiaco: an immense variety of musical ideas flow together in this sonata form with exposition, development, and reprise. The second movement consists in a seemingly endless set of variations. According to his friend Nikolai Kashkin, Tchaikovsky wanted to “paint a musical portrait of Rubinstein in different phases of his life”.
Whether that be true or not, this is indeed a musical broadsheet of illustrated character variations. Particular mention can be made of the third variation, a brilliant piano caprice, the fifth, where the piano imitates bell chimes, the sixth in form of a waltz, and the elaborate fugue in the eighth. The twelfth variation-cum-finale sets in powerfully and energetically, but harks back to the first movement by concluding with a poignant funeral march.
Chief Vienna music critic Eduard Hanslick found that Tchaikovsky’s trio, despite “a number of original traits and successful turns of phrase”, belonged to the kind of “quasi-suicidal compositions that destroy their own effect because of their merciless length”. Today, however, it is regarded as one of
the milestones in the genre of chamber music with piano.
The German newspaper Die Welt described a performance of the Boulanger Trio as irresistible, while Wolfgang Rihm wrote in a letter: To be interpreted in this way is surely the great dream of every composer. Founded in Hamburg in 2006 by Karla Haltenwanger (piano), Birgit Erz (violin) and Ilona Kindt (cello), the ensemble is now one of the few full-time piano trios currently based in Berlin. Already in 2007 they won the 4th Trondheim International Chamber Music Competition in Norway, followed by the Rauhe Prize for New Chamber Music in 2008. The ensemble has received crucial musical guidance from Hatto Beyerle, Menahem Pressler, and Alfred Brendel.
In the past years, the trio has gained an excellent reputation in the world of chamber music, with regular appearances at the Heidelberger Frühling, Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Sommerliche Musiktage Hitzacker, the Dialogs at Salzburg Mozarteum, and Ultraschall in Berlin. In tandem with chamber music partners such as Nils Mönkemeyer (viola), Sebastian Manz (clarinet) and Andrè Schuen (baritone), the trio has performed at prestigious venues such as the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Wigmore Hall in London and the Philharmonie and the Konzerthaus in Berlin.
In addition to works of the Classical and Romantic periods, the three musicians are much in demand as performers of new music. The Boulanger Trio collaborates with composers such as Wolfgang Rihm, Johannes Maria Staud, Friedrich Cerha, Toshio Hosokawa, and Matthias Pintscher. In 2012, the trio launched its own concert series, the Boulangerie, in Hamburg and Berlin, and starting with this season it is also being exported to the Musikverein in Vienna. At every one of these concerts, a classical composition is performed alongside a piece of contemporary music, the composer of which is always present and talks with the three musicians about his or her oeuvre.
In 2016, the Boulanger Trio added two new recordings on the CAvi-music label to its discography: Solitaires, and a portrait CD celebrating the 90th birthday of Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha, after five previous releases on the Ars and Hänssler Profil labels that featured works by composers such as Shostakovich, Vasks, Liszt, and Schoenberg.
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