LDV76

PHILIPPE CASSARD, ANNE GASTINEL, DAVID GRIMAL 17 David Grimal: . . . at a loose end? Let’s just say that in Beethoven you don’t have the full scoring to be found in Brahms’s trios, or even in those of Mendelssohn or Schumann. In those pieces, the roles are shared out in a muchmore balanced way! It’s quite true that Beethoven’s trios are often dominated by the piano: the finale of the ‘Archduke’, for example, is practically a piano concerto. But this supposed ‘simplicity’ for the strings is a feint: it’s all part of Beethoven’s genius to throw in a little banana skin from time to time, tomake surewe don’t fall asleep over our part! Philippe Cassard: I would temper the opinion of my two colleagues, because I think that if there’s one piece in all of Beethoven’s trios where everyone has a lot to do, it’s the ‘Ghost’. The strings are constantly involved, the texture is very interwoven, dovetailed, polyphonic, the cello doesn’t just play the bass, sometimes the piano intervenes in a dialogue between the violin and the cello, and so on. For once, the strings are not there only as assistants or onlookers to the – substantial – piano part. After all, they do get to play the slowmovement theme twice!