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Brahms & Krenek, Piano Trios
Johannes Brahms - Ernst Křenek

Brahms & Krenek, Piano Trios

Feininger Trio

Label: CAvi
Format: CD
Barcode: 4260085535255
barcode
Catalog number: AVI 8553525
Releasedate: 13-10-23
- This is the fifth album of the Feininger Trio, members of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra – after a Dvorak/Smetana album, Debussy/Ravel album, an album with a famous German actress – and now BRAHMS plus, a series planned on three CDs, highlighting the young composers following the Brahms times, along the Brahms Piano Trios.

- Vol. III of three albums to come – showing the relationship between Brahms and some of the next generation into the 20c – Ernst Krenek.

- A 10-minute work in one sole movement such as this Trio-Fantasia by Ernst Krenek provides a welcome, fitting complement to an incredible masterpiece. Still, its sparse texture requires a certain amount of contrast and completion in the form of an opulent, sonorous work, which we find in Brahms’s Trio in B Major, Op. 8.
Kreneks relation to Brahms
Volker Michael in conversation with David Riniker

Brahms, Piano Trio No. 1 B Major, Op. 8(1889)
….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.

Ernst Krenek, Trio Fantasy Op. 63
…..The instrumental parts 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.