Briefly Noted: A Trio of 20th-century Piano Trios

Montsalvatge / Tailleferre / Korngold, Piano Trios, Andrist-Stern-Honigberg Trio (released on August 4, 2023) Centaur CRC4037 | 57'11"

Audrey Andrist has been a long-time fixture at Washington-area concerts, particularly in contemporary repertoire. The Canadian-born pianist plays often with her husband, violinist James Stern, as a duo and, with National Symphony Orchestra cellist Steven Honigberg, as the anchor of a rather fine piano trio.

While beautifully played, the new disc from the Andrist-Stern-Honigberg Trio, released by Centaur Records, is of interest primarily because of its intriguing combination of music. First is the Piano Trio by Xavier Montsalvatge, dating from the 1980s, when the Catalan composer was in his 70s. This suave, refined work, infused with jazz and folk elements, feels like a love letter to Spain. Its first movement is a "Balada a Dulcinea," infused with tender sweetness for Don Quixote's imagined sweetheart, followed by a "Diálogo con Mompou," referring to another composer, Montsalvatge's contemporary from Barcelona.

Adding to the recent rediscovery of Germaine Tailleferre's piano music is her Piano Trio, composed during World War I, when it went unnoticed and unpublished. The French composer took the piece up again in 1978, when she was in her 80s, and the revised version is a mixture of early and late styles, as she wrote a new second movement and added a fourth-movement finale. With each of the four movements clocking in at a balanced three minutes each, the piece has a pleasing unity.

Erich Korngold composed the final Piano Trio on this disc, the longest of the three works, when he was only twelve years old. The piece was among the fruit of his tutelage with Zemlinsky, study recommended by Gustav Mahler, who had heard a cantata the boy had written. A child prodigy, Korngold had already had a ballet score performed professionally in Vienna, and Artur Schnabel was performing his piano sonata around Europe. This trio is a tour de force for the pianist, and Andrist rises to the occasion, especially in the rollicking Scherzo, an hommage to the Viennese waltz redolent of both Strauss and Mahler.

Briefly Noted: Tailleferre's Piano Music

Germaine Tailleferre, Complete Piano Music, Vol. 1, Nicolas Horvath (released on April 1, 2022) Grand Piano GP891 | 83'21"

Germaine Tailleferre was the only woman included in the group of French composers styled as Les Six. Even the writer Jean Cocteau, whose leadership brought the group to fame, pushed her into the background, at one point deriding her as "une Marie Laurencin pour l'oreille." (Laurencin, in fact, painted a portrait of Cocteau in the 1920s.) That brief period of association was just the first phase of Tailleferre's long compositional career, that lasted into her 90s, almost until her death in 1983. She lived in the United States twice, in the 1920s, with her first husband, and again in Philadelphia during World War II.

Her music is not well known here, although hopefully that will change as ensembles seek to include more music composed by women: for example, last spring, Chiarina Chamber Players performed her Harp Sonata and her Piano Trio. Pianist Nicolas Horvath, known for his marathon complete performances and recordings of many modern composers such as Satie, Stockhausen, and Glass, is undertaking a complete recording of her piano music. These three volumes will bring together all of the composer's pieces for piano, many recorded for the first time, thanks to permission granted by the composer's granddaughter and sole heir.

Most of the pieces in this first volume are short character pieces, many collected into longer suites. Like Nadia Boulanger she was interested in the monuments of French music history. She collected transcriptions of bits of music by Lully and other French and Italian composers in her Petites ouvertures d'airs anciens, while the influence of baroque style runs through her collection Fleurs de France and the Suite dans le style Louis XV. She was, among other things, talented at mimicry, with many of these brief pieces in imitation of various types of music both real and fanciful (Wagner, Debussy, Ravel, Sicilienne, Inca, Amazon).

The only track longer than a few minutes is the piano version of her unusual score for Sous le rampart d'Athènes, music dominated by trilling figures that is probably much more interesting in its orchestral incarnation. Tailleferre met the writer Paul Claudel, the younger brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel, on a ship returning to Europe after her first American stay. He commissioned her to write incidental music for this "philosophical dialogue" written to commemorate the centenary of the scholar Marcellin Berthelot's birth. Horvath's interpretations are sensitive and profound, although at times there are some technical shortcomings, as in repeated-note sections, which can be a little hesitant and clotted.