Berlin Stories Felix Mendelsson: Piano Trio No. 2; Juon: Litaniae, Op. 70; Skalkottas: Eight Variations on a Greek Folk Theme Trio Gaspard Chandos CHAN 20271 55:29 mins
Works by three composers who all lived in Berlin add up to a varied programme. As so often, the minor key inspires Mendelssohn to levels of almost violent passion, especially in the first movement of his C minor Piano Trio. But there’s also a more fleeting phantasmagorical layer which surfaces in the music, especially in the whirlwind scherzo. The players are alive to the changes of mood, bringing the sentiment in the Andante to the surface without overdoing it, and inflecting the final tarantella with enough rubato to shape the music but not losing impetus.
Juon’s Litaniae has the subtitle ‘Tone Poem’, although the composer was elusive as to the precise story. It’s in a late-Romantic, tonal style, and its 17-minute span includes the playful, the tragic and the ecstatic. But there is a tendency to meander and lose harmonic direction, which even this committed performance can’t quite conceal.
It’s thought that Skalkottas was one of Juon’s pupils in Berlin: but Schoenberg was a greater influence. In the Variations, he mixes tonal and serial language, and even the theme, which he composed in the style of a Greek dance, is harmonically unsettled. The variations are tight and compact, and there’s no let up in rhythmic energy.
Martin Cotton