Estonian Piano Trios
Artur Lemba (1885-1963)
Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat Major (1929)
Heino Eller (1887-1970)
Two Lyrical Pieces (1915)
Riho Esko Maimets (b. 1988)
Three Contemplations for Piano Trio (2019)
Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)
Mozart Adagio (1992)
Scala cromatica (2007)
Mari Poll (violin), Henry-David Varema (cello), Mihkel Poll (piano)
rec. 2020, Great Hall of the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre
DUX 1809 [63]
Three generations of Estonian composers put their best feet forward here. Dux, one of the most active of Polish labels, has minted a collection of Estonian piano trios in a mix of styles and with artist sensitivity to every style facet. In fact, there is only one piano trio by name and that is the four-movement Lemba piece. More accurately then, the four composers are represented by works for Piano Trio.
The four-movement Lemba Trio declares its articles of faith formulated in the great classics of the nineteenth century. There’s more than a modicum of variety here but within those declared bounds. While we can note the date from the end of the third decade of the last century, the music is kith and kin with Schubert, Smetana and Tchaikovsky. We might have expected Lemba to be a nationalist but his inclinations did not lie in that direction. He had had his inclinations planted deep by his student and early academic years in the St Petersburg Conservatory. Returning to plant his roots deep in native Estonian loam, he surrendered himself to classic romanticism and the exaltation that was part and parcel of the lyrical line. You can adduce the barely contained excitement of the finale if you have any doubts.
Eller was a contemporary of Lemba and also went through the St Petersburg ‘mill’. Dating from a decade before the Lemba - though the notes stipulate both 1915 and 1918 - the two Lyrical Pieces are freer of classical ‘chains’. They are chunky and closer to the purer Tchaikovskian camp. For me they occasionally recall Arensky. They’re attractive pieces and have an encouraging moody ozone about them.
Pärt, famed for his Cantus - In memoriam Benjamin Britten, wrote his Mozart Adagio in 1992. It is dedicated to the memory of a violinist who shaped Pärt’s image in the world, Oleg Kagan. Its halting progress never veers off the Mozart road. Reverence, and the avoidance of anything mawkish, is everything; a parallel is to be found in the central movement of the Sinfonia Concertante in E flat, K364. The micrometer calibration of the companion piece is just as fragile.
Chronologically, we then come to Riho Esko Maimets, born half a century after Pärt. His Three Contemplations for Piano Trio are as reflective and easily bruised as the title might suggest. They are gentle essays which ponder the stellar-glinting nocturnal sky. They do no violence; rather they lay bare an inventive complexity. This is best exemplified in the shivering-shimmering Third Contemplation where you might say that Urmis Sisask meets Debussy.
The disc and booklet are enclosed in what has become the increasingly common three-fold card sleeve. The booklet essay is short and to the point. The author is Mihkel Poll.
Dux and the artists here are to be congratulated, They have conceived and carried through a freshly thought-through project centred on works that are not at all common fare.
Rob Barnett
Previous review: Rob Challinor
