Chamber Concert: Piano Trio

We look forward to a grand concert with a small ensemble: the programme features deeply emotional musical worlds that push the boundaries of chamber music. A biographer said of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio that it was »probably the most tragic« work in the composer’s oeuvre, explaining: »Whereas he was previously familiar with the pathos of his own personal tragedy, here he expresses the tragedy of a generation that has gone through death and torment.« The piece was written in 1944 as a sorrowful response to the unexpected death of a close friend, but it also addresses the terrors and grief of wartime. And so, after the despair of the opening funeral march, there are a series of menacing passages. In the Largo, a mournful lament unfolds – and after the macabre dance of death in the finale, the trio descends to a quiet but deeply oppressive silence. Tchaikovsky initially felt that a combination of violin, cello and piano was incapable of producing a composition »imbued with genuine feeling«. Fortunately for us, however, that was not his last word, and in 1882 he completed his monumental Opus 50. Again, the occasion was an unexpected death – that of his fatherly friend and patron Nikolai Rubinstein. Tchaikovsky thus composed one of the most important trios of the 19th century: it surprises not only with its unusual two-movement form and yet enormous dimensions, but also with its enormous expressive power, ranging from the elegiac to the folkloric to the tragic.

Tickets: from 25.08.2025 10 a.m.