Eliel Trio: Piano Trios by Brahms and Mendelssohn

The piano trios heard on this program are not only among the most often performed works in the genre, but are also examples of works going through stages of revisions and refinement until reaching their final, ideal shape. In composing the D minor piano trio, Felix Mendelssohn took advice from the fellow composer colleague Ferdinand Hiller and substantially altered the work to make the piano part more prominent. In his role as reviewer, Robert Schumann wrote upon hearing the trio that Mendelssohn was "the Mozart of the nineteenth century, the brightest musician, who most clearly understands the contradictions of the age and is the first to reconcile them."  Although originally published just a decade after Mendelssohn's trio, the version most often heard of the Brahms B major trio was revised as late as in 1889. It is among the few Romantic multi-movement works to begin in a major key and end in the tonic minor (another example being Felix Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony).   In contrast to these large-scale works, we also hear Fanny Hensel's "October" from Das Jahr, a cycle of pieces inspired by the 12 months of the year, and written 35 years before Tchaikovsky's famous cycle on the same theme. These works were written during Fanny's travels to Italy with her husband, Wilhelm Hensel, just a short time after Liszt journeyed through the same country, as later documented in his Années de pèlerinage.