Beethoven: Piano Trios, Vol. 3 (SACD)

With the three Piano Trios op. 1, published in 1795, Ludwig van Beethoven took on a genre that was still largely associated with salon music and elevated it to a rival of the string quartet. In these works, Beethoven saw the true beginning of his creative journey. The Trio in E flat major op. 1 no. 1, probably composed (at least in a preliminary version) before his move from his native Bonn to the Vienna of Haydn and Mozart, reveals a composer who, although still drawing inspiration from his famous predecessors, was beginning to show his own witty personality, characterized by mischievous, sometimes tigerish playfulness. The two Trios op. 70, composed some fifteen years later, "raise the genre to a level from which the later piano trio literature could develop", as Beethoven specialist Lewis Lockwood put it. In fact, they clearly influenced the later trios by Schumann, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. The first of them, which is played here, is the more significant. Its nickname 'Ghost Trio' refers to the unsettling middle movement, which is characterized by a 'horror' style and features a number of eerie effects. This recording by the Sitkovetsky Trio ends with an arrangement by the trio's cellist, Isang Enders, of a catchy and eloquently simple Ukrainian Cossack melody from a collection of Beethoven's folk song arrangements, which Schubert would no doubt have loved.