LDV64.5

GEOFFROY COUTEAU, AMAURY COEYTAUX, RAPHAËL PERRAUD, NICOLAS BALDEYROU 21 This trio, aswehear it in its final version, is amasterpiece. Its openingphrase, anoble and voluptuous melody assigned to the cello, is typical of Brahms’s outpourings, with its breadth and its characteristic swinging rhythm, which gradually bring into being a whole epic and symphonic world whose power is equalled only by its majesty. The second movement, Scherzo, is wild and capricious, in the spirit of a ballade, with a theme possessing a strong folk character. From this emerges a lovely, lilting Trio, a caressing waltz-lullaby of the kind so frequent in Brahms. The Adagio that follows is an admirable hymn to the night, static and marmoreal like the Novalis poems so entitled. The wide-spanned piano chords to which the strings respond create a kind of spatial music (one might think this was Ives already!), like porticoes framing the song of Nature itself. An intermezzo has the cello playing a cantabile solo, a superb lament, in a device that Brahms was to reuse in the Andante of his Second Piano Concerto. A great mystical movement that calls late Beethoven tomind, especially the Adagio of his ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata op.106. The tumultuous concluding Allegro, also introduced by the cello, features a fervent chorale (that hallmark of German music, also used by Schumann and Mendelssohn) which will carry the movement irresistibly to its Dionysian conclusion – with an oceanic power worthy of the First Piano Concerto of five years later.