Piano Trio No.2 in B minor, Op.76

Turina’s chamber music is little known in this country. We too readily associate him with Spanish contemporaries - like the somewhat older Albéniz and Granados or his friend Manuel de Falla - and assume that he wasn’t very interested in that kind of thing. In fact, while he was no less willing than the others to celebrate Spanish folk music in virtuoso piano pieces or colourful orchestral scores, there was always a more conservative, classically inclined side to him. The instruction he was given as a student at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, where he learned the principles of cyclic composition from the César Franck disciple Vincent d’Indy, he never rejected - however deep his involvement in Spanish musical life and his attachment to the flamenco idiom of his native Seville.

Apart from the string-quartet version of La oración del torero (which is actually an arrangement of a piece originally written for four lutes) the most attractive of Turina’s chamber music works must be his Second Piano Trio in B minor, Op.76, written between July 1932 and February 1933. Certainly, it is a most convincing example of the reconciliation he achieved between Schola Cantorum form and Spanish content. Not that there is anything aggressively Spanish about Turina’s language here. Indeed, the ardent main theme of the first movement, introduced by violin and cello after a brief Lento introduction, could almost be by Fauré or even Brahms in places. Its origin, like that of the prettily coloured second subject, is betrayed by just a few distinctive features in harmony and rhythm.

While there are echoes of Ravel in the ingeniously scored Scherzo, the intricately detailed texture of the opening bars, against which the piano is about to extend a sustained and irresistibly shaped melodic line, is clearly Spanish (or Basque) in its motivation. The Finale, on the other hand, is concerned above all with completing the cyclic construction of the work, recalling earlier ideas - the sustained melody from the Scherzo, the two main themes of the first movement - while increasing the pace through no fewer than six tempo changes to an effectively calculated climax.

Gerald Larner©