Feininger Trio - Brahms & Krenek: Piano Trios

This is the fifth album of the Feininger Trio: members of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra.

By combining Brahms's piano trios with works in the same genre by his younger Viennese successors, we aim to open up new perspectives on Brahms's output. The two works featured on the current release, Brahms's Trio Op. 8 and Ernst Krenek's Trio-Fantasia Op. 63, are essentially different in one particular way. In Brahms, the two string instruments often play together, either in octaves or in sixths, and the two are particularly closely intertwined in the B Major Trio (Op. 8). Krenek, however, handles the violin and the cello quite differenty: they respond to one another as in a question-and-answer game, or they take up their musical partner's material and carry it a step further.

The instrumental parts in Krenek's work are not as closely interwoven in this piece as in Brahms's trio. But Krenek's Op. 63 seems to depict an entire life story. It starts very softly; then, a series of events take place, just as in real life; toward the end, the music seems to vanish into the heavens. We come, and we go. That expressive life curve is profoundly moving and provides unity. The work thus follows a form akin to an arc: at the end, we return to where we started, but not before having experienced utter transformation in the course of the piece.

GRAMOPHONE EDITORS' CHOICE