Tchaikovsky: Piano Trio / Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht

Featuring

Anna Lipkind-Mazor
Dmitrii Prokofiev
Andrey Gugnin
Amsterdam Piano Trio
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Arnold Schoenberg

Did you know?

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Critical Reception

Early critics of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht were offended by its connection to the notorious poet Dehmel and by its audacious musical language, with the Vienna Music Society singling out a chord that 'did not exist'.

Composer Biography

Verklärte Nacht is widely considered a love letter from Schoenberg to Mathilde, the sister of his music teacher and friend Alexander Zemlinsky, whom he later married.

Composition History

Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50, carries the subtitle 'In memory of a great artist,' referring to Nikolai Rubinstein, the founder of the Moscow Conservatoire and Tchaikovsky's mentor and friend.

Compositional Technique

Tchaikovsky initially had misgivings about the piano trio genre, worrying that the piano and strings would 'repel each other,' but he approached the task by translating symphonic writing in the first movement and creating innovative chamber music textures in the second.

Composer's Artistic Vision

This album reveals a line of continuity between Tchaikovsky, the great Russian Romantic, and Schoenberg, the great Viennese modernist, a decade before Schoenberg abandoned tonality.

Composition History

Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht ('Transfigured Night') was inspired by the poetry of Richard Dehmel, a trailblazing poet whose volume Weib und Welt ('Woman and World') explored sexuality from a female perspective.

Critical Reception

Tchaikovsky's emotional expression was initially criticized as 'hysterical' but later reinterpreted as 'psychological realism,' leading to posthumous praise for his ability to create powerful human dramas through music.