String Trio in F major Op.14 No.1/G95 (1773)

Think of a string ensemble, anything from duo to sextet, and the chances are that there will be at least a few interesting examples in the Boccherini chamber-music catalogue. He was not as prolific in producing trios as he was in producing quartets and quintets - he wrote just under 50 trios, twice as many quartets and well over 100 quintets - but he made a significant (if at present under-explored) contribution to an area of the repertoire little cultivated by his contemporaries in major centres like Vienna and Paris.

The motivation for Boccherini’s extraordinary activity was partly his professional duty to furnish scores for his noble patrons in Spain, where he had settled in 1768, but also an apparently unfailing delight in string textures. The remarkable opening of the String Trio in F Op.14 No.1 is just one example of his interest in texture for its own sake. It is true that the opening bars act as an introduction to the main theme, which is about to appear on violin, but they are purely colouristic and have no thematic function. They are recalled at the beginning of the development section but omitted from the recapitulation.

While the textures are authentically classical, in that the three instruments are treated as equals, they have their own distinctive sound, which derives to some extent from the freely ranging cello part. Far from tying the cello to the bass line, Boccherini, a cellist himself, frequently pitches its line above that of the viola. The short but expressive, initially almost funereal slow movement of the present Trio in F offers a particularly appealing example of Boccherini’s scoring for his favourite instrument. If the cello part, which includes a brief cadenza, seems too soloistic for a truly democratic exchange of ideas, it compensates to some extent by reverting to the bass line towards the end. It stays there for much, though not all, of the brightly conclusive Minuetto where the favoured instrument, in the contrastingly anxious middle section at least, is the violin.