Hyperion Records

In the Op 1 trios Beethoven had already given the two string instruments more of the limelight than they had enjoyed in the keyboard-dominated trios of Mozart and Haydn. But with the Op 70 trios their emancipation is complete. The three instruments now discourse as equals in kaleidoscopically varied textures, rich in the free contrapuntal interplay that is one of the glories of the Viennese classical style. In the D major, the only one of Beethoven’s mature piano trios in three movements, the explosive unison opening is immediately countered by a dissonant, disorientating F natural high in the cello’s plangent tenor register; the cello then slips back into D major with a beseeching lyrical melody that passes in turn to violin and piano. This opening at once establishes the highly charged, volatile nature of a movement that trades on abrupt contrasts of texture and dynamics and, in the development, some of the composer’s most rugged, rebarbative imitative writing. Inevitably in Beethoven, the flatward pull of the ‘wrong note’ F natural has long-term structural consequences, both in the recapitulation, where it initiates a poetic expansion of the beseeching cello melody in a remote-sounding B flat major, and in the finale.

The D minor ‘Largo assai ed espressivo’ which spawned the work’s nickname ‘Ghost Trio’ is the slowest slow movement in all Beethoven, and the most impressionistic. The weirdly fragmented thematic material, unstable harmonies and sombre, quasi-orchestral textures, with eerie tremolos in the bowels of the keyboard, combine to produce music of extraordinary tension and Gothic gloom. And it is no surprise to discover that Beethoven noted down the brooding opening theme among sketches for the Witches’ music in a projected Macbeth opera. The finale restores us to a world of convivial normality, with its supple, gracious themes and crystalline textures. There is whimsical humour, too, in the main theme’s hesitations and harmonic feints, deliciously amplified in the coda, while the implications of the first movement’s stray F natural make themselves felt in the brusque or ruminative shifts to distant flat keys.

from notes by Richard Wigmore © 2003