String Trio in G minor (1893-4)

Lento

Although Sibelius himself attributed his unfinished String Trio in G minor to 1885 - which seems impossibly early for such an adventurous project - the consensus of scholarly opinion is that it was written in 1893 or 1894. We don’t know the overall shape it would have taken, or how the present Lento would have related to two fragmentary movements that have survived alonside it, but it is clearly a very much more mature composition than the Suite in A major. Indeed, it is an extraordinary inspiration, not only because of the sonorities Sibelius finds in the string trio - making the average string quartet sound thin in comparison - but also because it seems to be a chamber-music experiment in the epic manner he was developing in his orchestral tone poems at the time.

While there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that it is based on an episode in the Kalevala, or any other narrative source, the String Trio in G minor does seem to be about more than just music. No purely abstract work, surely, would begin with a succession of twelve detached chords, each one swollen into an aggressive crescendo (Finlandia, which is certainly programmatic, begins in a not dissimilar way). There are other dramatic gestures early on in the piece, like the declamatory main theme emphatically introduced by all three instruments and the passionate cello soliloquy leading to the entry of the more lyrical but still intensely expressive second theme. The pressure is not relaxed throughout an eventful development and, demanding consistently virtuoso participation from all three instruments, is sustained up to the suddenly quiet closing bars. The main theme of the Lento appears again, incidentally, in the longer of the two fragmentary movements.