Prior to the concert given by the Ravel Trio on February 12, I talked with pianist Dan Lau about his experiences playing with the trio and about the music they would be performing.
M: How and when did the Ravel Trio form and get started?
D: All three of our current members are founding members of the Ravel Trio. Nancy Baun on cello and Simon Maurer on violin and me on piano. We were put together for a specific purpose initially, a modern dance show called "Unsilenced Voices." The show focussed on the voices that had been silenced too early by tragedy and the compositions and works of art that arose out of these tragedies that served to keep those voices alive. The presenters wanted live music to accompany this particular show and so Nancy, Simon and I were actually put together to be essentially the pit band, if you will, for this particular dance program. That program doesn't exist anymore, but the trio does. One of the things that we really enjoyed about the experience was playing together, the three of us. That was in 2003 and we have been playing every since. We've had a chance to travel quite a bit. We've done four or five European tours and travelled, especially around the Mid-Atlantic area a great deal.
M: What are some of your favorite memories performing internationally? You've been to Switzerland quite a bit.
D: Simon (our violinist) has been in the United States most of his adult life, but he was born in Switzerland and he has family back there. So, we had the opportunity to go to Switzerland and perform a number of times and it's been a very nice experience. One of our first tours was in celebration of Simon's father's birthday. Simon's father is a musician and Simon wanted to something special, so we went over there and played a lot of his favorite music. On one of the subsequent tours we took to Switzerland we had a chance to premier a couple of trios that were written specifically for us and that was a real treat. The works were written by two composers, Daniel Andres, who is a fairly well-known Swiss composer and another, younger composer by the name of Christian Henking, who is a real up-and-comer. We were lucky enough that these two Swiss composers wrote piano trios for us and we were able to premier both works in Switzerland.
M: This upcoming concert includes three pieces: the Haydn Trio in C Major, the Clara Schumann Trio in g minor and then a composer who I must admit I had to look up because I'd never heard of him before: Arensky. Tell me, first about Arensky and then about the other two works on the program.
D: Arensky is in some ways more famous for who he taught than his own compositions. It's just one of those things. He is contemporary with people like Rachmaninoff and Scriabin and in fact he taught both of them as a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. He comes from that whole tradition of these Russian composers who emulated and revered Tchaikovsky. Interestingly enough, this trio is probably his most famous piece and I think it's a wonderful work. It's a work that embodies a lot of what you would expect from turn of the century Russian music. It's very passionate. It has virtuosic moments for all three instruments. It's in four movements and each movement has a very distinctive character to it. The first movement is the largest in structure. It's at moments very moody and brooding, but then it also has these wonderful outbursts of passion that make it a wonderfully romantic piece of music. The second movement is a Scherzo and it's just a fun, really light display. The piano writing is just phenomenal in that movement; lots of virtuosic moments for me with thousands of notes. The third movement is what you would expect; a slow movement. I don't think it's dark like the first movement, I think it's actually very sweet and beautiful. The third movement showcases the cello in a very special way. The fourth movement kind of brings together all elements with a very satisfying, big ending with a lot of virtuosic displays for all three instruments.
M: Is there a composer you would most compare Arensky to, stylistically?
D: I would say Rachmaninoff is the one who most closely resembles Arensky. Arensky wrote piano works too, some of which are very nice. It's interesting because the piano works tend to be very light. I don't think of them in profound terms at all. With the piano trio he goes quite a bit further when it comes to the expressive palette that he brings as a composer.
M: What could you tell listeners about the other two pieces on the program, the Haydn and Clara Schumann?
D: The Haydn is a remarkable piece of music. This work was written in 1795, so this is late in his life. He is in his 60s at this point and after years of being the court composer for the Esterházy royalty, he was released from his duties. He went to visit London where he was really inspired by the culture of the city. The Esterházy estate is in a rural area so the vast majority of Haydn's compositional life was not in a cultural area, which stoked his wonderful creative genius in a way. He had to be original. He didn't necessarily have as much stimulation from others around him. So, late in his life he is able to discover just that. This work comes from that period, which is just a wonderfully prolific period of his life when he writes his late piano sonatas, which are excellent, and take you right up to Beethoven and also the Oratorios: The Creation and The Seasons. The piano trios that come out of this period are really very beautiful too. This piano trio I think demonstrates Haydn very much at the height of his compositional powers. He's in his 60's and still writing wonderfully creative music, which is really amazing when you consider that Mozart had been born and died during Haydn's lifetime and only made it to age 35.
The Clara Schumann trio is a work that I think is very special. It's the only piano trio she writes and of course Clara Schumann was much more known and renowned for being a performer than a composer during her time. She was one of the finest pianists of her generation. Every bit the equal of, say Franz Liszt, as a performer, and along with Liszt was very much responsible for elevating the piano to the point where a solo piano recital was something that was considered to be the norm. Fortunately for us she was also a composer. She didn't compose a large number of compositions because, after Robert Schumann, her husband, passes away, she pretty much devotes the rest of her life to performing and championing his works, and so she doesn't write a whole lot after his death. So, we're very lucky to have this piece. Again, this is a Romantic piece of music and I think it's a piece that is very deserving of being heard. You hear elements of creativity that make you wonder, if she had devoted herself to composition alone, what the possibilities have been. In a lot of cases her music gets compared to that of her husband's and I think she compares very favorably to Robert Schumann.
M: Was she taken seriously as a composer during her lifetime?
D: I think so. For example, there was apparently a book of Lider (song) that was published during her's and Robert's lifetime where the songs were written by both of them and in the initial publication they didn't actually delineate who wrote which song. People knew that these were songs written by Robert and Clara Schumann. Who wrote which one? That, I think, speaks well of how favorably she measured up to her more well known composer husband.
