LDV81

18 SHOSTAKOVICH • WEINBERG Why did you choose to record the two Shostakovich trios? Justine — Shostakovich’s Trio no.2 is one of the first works that the three of us practised seriously together. I was thirteen at the time, Joseph fifteen and Victor seventeen. Why Shostakovich? Probably because our father loved his music and brought us up on a diet of Shostakovich from a very early age. After that, we played and replayed it, going through it over and over again until it became one of the pillars of our trio repertory. We were able to benefit from the advice of a large number of teachers, some of whom subsequently became friends. Those mentors include the members of the Quatuor Danel, the cellist Christoph Richter, and Emmanuel Utwiller, director of the International Dmitri Shostakovich Association of Paris. Emmanuel even gave us the opportunity to meet Irina Shostakovich, the composer’s widow. How do you prepare a work like Shostakovich’s Second Trio specifically for a recording? Joseph — The perception of time was one of the important aspects of our work. Justine and I focused our bowings entirely on a very oppressive temporality. As if we had to struggle inwardly in order to move forward. In one rehearsal just for the two of us, I even started to tell a story invented from scratch to define more clearly the atmosphere we were looking for. I had in my mind the image of a condemned man waiting for his executioner to arrive, in a snow-covered prison courtyard. This parable helped us to immerse ourselves in a very special temporality, which we thought fitted the opening bars of the work.