27 TRIO SŌRA What are the characteristics of this First Trio? What does it evoke for you? Pauline: I would say it’s the élan in which we’re caught up at once, created by the broad opening melody, which is a great declaration of love. Angèle: It’s impossible for any interpretation of this work to ignore Brahms’s spontaneous passion for Clara Schumann, which is expressed everywhere in his score, not only in that song theme I mentioned earlier but also in the central theme of the Scherzo which recurs in the finale. When you play the trio, you sense that love, but also his gratitude, his friendship towards the Schumanns, the whirlwind of multiple emotions that he must have experienced in their home. In contrast to the preceding movements, the finale in the minor mode is permeated with painful emotions and despair. After the Scherzo comes a highly mystical Adagio. Angèle: The three weeks we spent working with Eberhard Feltz had a very special impact on us. When we started playing the Adagio, he interrupted us to tell us about its celestial dimension, which he said was contained in the fifth you hear at the beginning. He presented it to us as a gaze towards heaven: ‘That fifth is God!’ As he urged us to repeat the movement dozens of times until we reached that heaven, we pushed the interpretation of this movement beyond anything we had imagined before.
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