Beaux Arts Trio
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| Home of Franz Schubert - Vienna, Austria - where he died (Photo credit: Pictophile) |
"[Schubert's Piano Trio in B flat major] is optimistic and immediately accessible to the perceptive listener. One is unaware of the tensions and spiritual anguish expressed in comments such as this: 'My creations come into being through musical insight and through the pain I suffer; those born of pain alone seem to please the world least.' The main theme of the first movement, intoned by unison violin and cello and supported by emphatic dotted rhythms in the piano, quotes his song 'Des Sängers Habe'; Schubert still follows the outline of traditional sonata form, but replaces Beethoven's thematic dialectic with the continually varied repetition of the internally balanced theme. The second movement wavers between the character of a lullaby and a gondola song until the florid piano passages of the middle section provide a change: the delicately fashioned scherzo builds up to a merry waltz in the trio: and the ingenious final movement, though labelled 'Rondo,' breaks all the rules of this form; changes of metre surprise us again and again, and the movement culminates in a marvellous stretta, marked presto." - Uwe Kraemer
Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat major, D. 929
