Trio Fortuny

16 April, 2022

Songs without words

Trio with piano

19:00

FCAYC Auditorium

Joel Bardolet, violin

Pau Codina, cello

Marc Heredia, piano

The Trio Fortuny presents a programme based on works by contemporary European composers, without losing sight of the great works of the repertoire. Based on the adagio of the Sonata for piano in F, KV 280 by W. A. Mozart, the Estonian Arvo Pärt composed – arranged, adapted, transformed – a posthumous musical tribute to the Russian violinist Oleg Kagan, a close friend and virtuoso interpreter of Mozart’s works. “In trio format, the violin and cello provide commentary, footnotes, reflections on the original material,” he quotes quite literally. In it, Pärt comments on Mozart without any sentimentality and endows it with a fourth dimension. The memory of a better time, a game close to improvisation on the basis of a classic.

Music which is also poetry is the guiding thread of the programme. The haikus that inspired the composer Josep Maria Guix, the Hebrew melody by Ernst Bloch and Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1 in Dm, op. 49 have the same narrative will to tell a story. One of Issa Kobayashi’s haikus that inspire Guix narrates:

“Morning mist,

a frenzy of drops

the tree sheds”.

His is a music in which orientalism and a fascination with sounds that transcend the instrument verge on the hypnotic. In turn, the night, inseparable from the romantic idea of the creative spirit, inspires Ernst Bloch’s Three Nocturnes, as dreamlike as they are energetic, music close to the traditional, almost folkloric but impregnated with a very modern language.
Finally, the Trio with piano, op. 49 is the most canonical work of the concert, a work that Mendelssohn rewrote and reworked to become one of the most emblematic of the genre. This composition portrays the tradition of song and word, of dance, of songs without words. The evocation of its non-verbal language is as direct as Kobayashi’s own haikus, again evoking the song of the Jewish people.

Programme

Arvo Pärt. Mozart – Adagio for piano trio (1992-2005)

Josep Maria Guix. Slowly… In Mist (Three haikus for piano trio) (2012)

Ernst Bloch. Three Nocturnes for piano trio (1924)

Felix Mendelssohn. Piano Trio No. 1 in D m, op. 49 (1839)

I. Molto allegro ed agitato
II. Andante con moto tranquillo
III. Scherzo: Leggiero e vivace
IV. Finale: Allegro assai appassionato