| Label: CAPRICCIO
Catalog: C7020
Format: CD A novel commissioning project produces some diverse and fascinating results
With 18 living composers writing piano trios in memory of Papa Haydn, form the “foot-tapping elegies” (sic) of Lalo Schifrin and Elena Kats-Chernin to the de-compositional aesthetic of Dieter Schnebel, responses are bound to be even more personal than usual. The Haydn Trio Eisenstadt cannot afford that luxury, of course, and its shy and retiring members (nowhere named on the packaging) bring the experience of recording all 429 of Haydn’s folksong arrangements to these commissions. What this means is dedication to the cause, and a mutual ease of ensemble even when confronted by the onslaught of, say, Torso IV by M’arton Illés.
The composers are all given the chance to explain themselves in the booklet. Those who are clearest with their words also have most to say with their notes. Several understandably pay tribute to The Creation: more to the idea than the notes, as it turns out. The most distinctive contributions are made by those who tell us that their piece developed from a focus on the colour of this chord or the form of that rondo, and you can hear that it does, and how the creative focus then expands in personal and unexpected directions. José María Sánchez-Verdú does this with hardly any notes at all. Jacqueline Fontyn, Betsy Jolas and Elisabeth Harnik also stick to a disciplined economy of ideas, and thereby evoke not least Haydn’s never-failing restraint and charm, even as their music ventures (just as his could) into dark and speculative regions.
The Trio’s fellow Autrians (apart from Harnik) seem largely concerned with arcane games in which only they know the rules—certainly the duty and four-square sequences of Johanna Doderer and Helmut Hodl only seem explicable as some elaborate joke—whereas the outward-facing playfulness of Bongani Ndodana-Breen’s two dances much more evidently stems from his Xhosa heritage, and his handling of an intrinsically limited idea is more adroit than the often pretty, etude-like homages by Xiaogang Ye and Yui Kakinuma. Of the other composers who are explicit about this gamesome quality of Haydn, only Schnebel and (in his very different away) William Bolcon approach the master— in terms both of engagement with Haydn’s own style and the deftness with which they tease a listener in search of a tonic, or a (double) bar.
Few of these commissions, you ma have gathered, fit comfortably within the domestic scale of the piano trio that Haydn (and his patrons) would have envisaged. John Woolrich does something different with The Night will not draw on, and brings its unassuming texture back to life ad though a friendly ghost had wandered into the room. The title of the piece is a quote from ETA Hoffmann, whose Tales tell us that he knew whereof he spoke when it came to Haydn’d world…of eternal youth”. Do give it a try.  Price: $33.98 |
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