Piano Trio No.1 (Poème), Op.8

As a student at the Petrograd (St Petersburg) Conservatoire, Shostakovich had to supplement his income by accompanying silent films on a cinema piano. “Sometimes he would fall asleep,” his sister recalled, “but sometimes he managed to use the time for himself. I remember that when he had composed his Piano Trio he and two friends rehearsed it in the cinema as the accompaniment to the film.”

That explains a lot about this extraordinary work. Written when Shostakovich was no more than seventeen and first performed when he moved to the Moscow Conservatoire in 1925, it was put on one side, forgotten and, nineteen years later, supplanted by the masterful four-movement Piano Trio in E minor Op.67. It came to light again only after the composer’s death and was first published – with the bits that were missing from the manuscript reconstructed by his pupil Boris Tishchenko – as long as sixty years after it was written. And there was Shostakovich’s silent-cinema past unmistakably revealed: although it approximates to sonata form, the single-movement Piano Trio is so unpredictably changeable in mood and tempo that it could have been improvised as a commentary on the events depicted on the silver screen.

Another very relevant biographical detail about Shostakovich’s Piano Trio, Op.8, is that it is dedicated to Tatyana Glivenko, a seventeen-year-old girl he had met while recuperating from tuberculosis at Gaspra in the Crimea in the summer of 1923. According to the sister again, “She was, I think, the only true love of my brother.” It was surely Tatyana who inspired the amorous opening Andante section. Characteristically, as though to pour scorn on the romantic sentiment, the music than veers away at high speed and in a very different direction. It is significant, however, that a three-note melodic motif is common to both these sections. It is incorporated also in a new theme introduced by cello in an impassioned Allegro but left out of a second romantic Andante melody presented high on the cello A-string under tinkling harmonies in the right hand of the piano. The rest – a forceful Allegro and a skittering Prestissimo fantastico – is development and, as the opening Andante material returns, recapitulation. The work ends with an extended and impassioned coda.

Gerald Larner©