We welcome back to Luton this formidable trio of young musicians in a fascinating programme.
Considering Brahms’s Horn Trio in the context of our theme of Family Relationships it is clearly another work inextricably bound up in the great German composer’s biography. He wrote it in 1865, the year his mother Christiane died; this can surely be heard in the heartfelt idiom of the slow third movement, the Adagio mesto. Brahms’s family situation was not entirely straightforward. His mother was 17 years older than his father and when she died his father immediately re-married, this time to a widow – Caroline Schnack – who was 18 years his junior. Brahms had a very good relationship with his new step-mother and indeed when his father died continued dutifully and with genuine affection to support her and his step-brother. Is it though any coincidence that his infatuation with Clara Schumann, a woman 14 years older than him, seems to mirror perhaps the unusual age gap between parental figures in his life?
Richard Sisson
Programme
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Horn Quintet K407 (arr. for horn trio)
Dame Ethel Smyth – Trio for violin, horn and piano
Clara Schumann – Three Romances for Violin and Piano Op 22
Johannes Brahms – Horn Trio Op 40
“Goldscheider becoming a musical Bear Grylls, fearlessly leaping…”
Huffington Post