WMV Music Web Log

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a Chelsea café (Café Bergamote, to be precise) with Marilyn. Ah, New York! The cappuccino was perfect. I said to Marilyn, "I would like to start a piano trio", and we both noticed that the fellow next to us practically jumped out of his seat. I guess that I am not the only one who would like to start a piano trio! But it is unlikely that the same scene would occur in a DC Starbucks. Most people here seem to think a piano trio is three pianos ("doesn't that get a little competitive?").

Why a piano trio? I had a trio when I was 12, The Stratford Trio, named after our house on Stratford Avenue in St. Louis. David Lang, the wonderful violinist/music teacher put it together for us at school. Martha Velick played cello (she was later to be my first love), Phil Grossman, the son of St. Louis Symphony violinist Izzie Grossman, played violin. We performed at University City High School before a crowd of at least 1000 - the first movements of Mozart Bb and Mendelssohn d minor trios. We even got reviewed: the school newspaper did a parody, I think comparing us to monkeys - I was grindingly resentful for years.

I love the trio repertoire - the great Brahms B major (and C), Schubert Bb, Beethoven "Archduke", Dvorak's "Dumky", the passionate Smetana, the gorgeous Fauré... Then there are Shostakovich, Schumann F, 7 Mozarts, dozens by Haydn, the Eb Schubert, more by Beethoven, Dvorak, Brahms, Schumann. Neglected masterpieces by Amy Beach, Charles Ives, Rebecca Clarke, George Walker, Bohuslav Martinu.

A trio has both schmaltz and power - the strings provide lyric capability and the piano can do rhythm, emphasis and contrast.

But it also has challenges: strings and piano do not communicate well, and there are built in occasions for resentment. There is the intonation problem: all piano notes are out of tune as far as strings are concerned; they have spent a gazillion hours worrying about intonation issues, and it is mostly irrelevant with piano. Strings know what a bow arm does, but no one has ever suggested to them that they look at a pianist's fingers to get closer ensemble. They have been trained to treat the pianist as a kind of obedient pony - he follows them, not the other way around. The piano is potentially louder than most string instruments, and strings are very paranoid about being drowned out. In my meeker years, I once played a concert with the music rack on top of a closed piano lid with a thick blanket laid over it at the insistence of my colleagues, who were trying to get the balance "right".

The pianist cannot play as fast as the strings, in general. They have a single line, and he has as many as four independent voices simultaneously. There is no disputing that piano parts are simply harder to learn and play than the string parts. Yet, the pianist is often regarded as retarded, incompetent, or lazy when he can't quite keep up.

So basically, string players' attitude is, would this piano jerk just leave us the heck alone! We understand each other, and the piano just causes trouble.

But why would the strings bother to play trios, if the medium is so annoying to them? This is a complex question. One would think that their first choice would be string quartet, the most perfect of classical ensembles, and indeed it is. However, the opportunities for obsessive perfectionism then become overwhelming, and most professional strings wistfully leave string quartets to the full time ensembles. Although they are perfectly content to perform a (piano) trio on two rehearsals, they claim to need at least half a dozen rehearsals to perform a string quartet.

It is a little like gender differences - there is often a communication gap.

What to do? It is a problem, since I love the sound of the trio ensemble so much. What do other pianists do about it? I haven't really done any research, but my impression is that we pianists often turn back in frustration to the solo repertoire.

From a pianist's point of view, I think working in a piano trio calls for a combination of hard-assed insistence on considerate behavior from our colleagues and zero tolerance for the typical string misbehaviors, since after all, we are outnumbered two to one.

Labels: Piano Trios