The Brahms Piano Trio

Click to enlarge February 12, 2003

MUSIC REVIEW
Seamless turn from three to one
By Chris Pasles, Times Staff Writer

The Brahms Piano Trio made an impassioned Los Angeles area debut Monday at the Cal State Northridge Performing Arts Center, as part of the Music Guild series. Two of the musicians were familiar. Violinist Alla Aranovskaya and cellist Leonid Shukayev play in the renowned St. Petersburg String Quartet, which regularly tours. Joining them was pianist Maxim Mogilevsky.

The three shared the same approach to the music, melding seamlessly as an ensemble. They played Brahms' glorious Piano Trio in B, Opus 8, as if to the style born. It was rich, comforting, noble, heroic, bold, intimate, prayerful, ineffable.

They opened the concert with Rachmaninoff's "Trio elegiaque" in G minor, a work that could be ascribed to Tchaikovsky, with no loss of dignity for either composer.

They brought two unfamiliar pieces. The first was the only completed movement of a Piano Trio in E flat that Alexander Alyabiev wrote shortly before the War of 1812. Though clearly influenced by Mozart and Beethoven, the music is accomplished and engaging.

The most challenging work, however, was the Los Angeles premiere of Georgian composer Zurab Nadarejshvili's powerful Piano Trio, composed in 1995. Combining 12-tone theory and native folk music, it suggests a history of the world, from the Big Bang opening to laments for the dead.

What happens in between is evoked by the use of Stalin's favorite folk tune, "Suliko," to represent the Soviet dictator. Its obsessive recurrence reflects increasingly desperate efforts to make real music out of the banal tune. The finale is an overwhelming memorial to the victims of his regime.


"The calibrations and colors of sound were a good part of [the Shostakovich] hitting its mark so movingly . . . Shukayev whistling the eerie cello harmonics, Aranovskaya joining with a sound so plaintive it startled with its quiet power, Mogilevsky adding a new voice in registers high and low . . . the trio played off each other in great sympathy . . . Finely nuanced dynamic shaping and equally finely tuned agogic accents made the playfulness, the irony and the bite . . . readily apparent."
- Ann Arbor News


"The trio plunged with aplomb into the [Ravel’s] starkly drawn, soul-searching sentiments and carried it with consummate skill through searing statements and deeply uttered laments to its conclusion, bursting with a bright promise . . . In the stirring climax of the work, the piano was exultant and the strings shimmered . . . [In Dvorak’s ‘Dumky’ Trio] Aranovskaya's violin was sweet and soaring; Shukayev's cello sang in rich tones; Mogilevsky's piano underscored the tranquil passages and energized the high ones. The Brahms Trio turned to its namesake for an impassioned encore.
- Columbus Dispatch


"The Brahms Piano Trio made an impassioned Los Angeles area debut . . . melding seamlessly as an ensemble . . . rich, comforting, noble, heroic, bold, intimate, prayerful, ineffable."
Los Angeles Times


The St. Petersburg Quartet’s incomparable first violinist Alla Aranovskaya and cellist Leonid Shukayev join pianist Maxim Mogilevsky (winner of three international piano competitions, and the last pupil of A. Sumbatian, teacher of Vladimir Ashkenazy). Their début season in 2002-03 included NYC’s Frick Collection, Cleveland Museum of Fine Arts, and L.A. Music Guild.


Sample programs:

  1. Ravel Trio
    Shostakovich Trio No.2
    Tchaikovsky Trio in A minor op.50

  2. Alyabiev ("the Russian Mozart"): Trio in E-flat (unfinished)
    Zurab Nadarejshvili: Piano Trio
    Rachmaninoff: Elegiac Trio No.1 in G minor
    Brahms: Piano Trio in B major, Op.8

  3. Beethoven: Trio in C min. op.1 no.3
    Dvorak: "Dumky" Trio
    Ravel: Trio

  4. Special All-Brahms Program:
    Sonata for Violin and Piano in G major, Op. 78
    Sonata for Cello and Piano in F major, Op.99
    Piano Trio in B major, Op.8