25/05/2020
Appropriate to this Memorial Day, here is an Elegy for Piano Trio by Alexander Krein. We recorded it for our most recent album devoted to Krein's Chamber Music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90cURZG3UkM
Noah Bendix-Balgley, violin
Aron Zelkowicz, cello
Rodrigo Ojeda, piano
Program notes on the work by Jonathan Powell:
https://toccataclassics.com/product/alexander-krein-chamber-music/
The Elegy, Op. 16 is in part not distant in mood from the slow movements of the major Russian piano trios of the late nineteenth century – Tchaikovsky, Arensky and Rachmaninov in particular – with its expressive fervour, harmonic lushness and nostalgic intensity. But as the work
progresses, the mood shifts and a different world presents itself, one of recitative underpinned by daring, highly coloured harmonies. As with many works of Krein’s earlier period, a slowish triple metre is articulated by chromatic voice- leading between harmonies, and melodies alternate between chorale-like motifs and arpeggiated fragments.
Dated 1913 in the published score, the Elegy is dedicated to David Shor, the pianist of the Moscow Piano Trio, in which Alexander’s brother David was violinist. Shor was prominent in the Moscow branch of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, a leading Russian Zionist and, after emigration in 1925, the first professor of music in the Hebrew University. His demands that Jewish music should be integrated into Russian traditions and yet remain distinctive is brought
to life in Krein’s Elegiya, in which the more traditional Russian elements (heard at the beginning and in subsequent reprises) are contrasted with and reworked with the declamatory, highly chromatic sections that are very close in substance to Krein’s contemporaneous settings of Jewish poetry. The shift between these two worlds is sometimes sudden, at other times
gradual.
Recorded as part of the Pittsburgh Jewish Music Festival's album Russian Jewish Classics, Vol.5: "Alexander Krein: Chamber Music" on the Toccata Classics lab...
