The three principal instruments of the orchestral string family might seem to offer the most natural of chamber-music combinations, yet the number of unqualified great works in the string-trio repertory can be counted on the fingers of one hand. With due deference to Beethoven’s examples, all composed before he reached 30, it’s arguable that the genre has produced only two masterpieces. One of them is Mozart’s E flat Divertimento, K563, and the other is Schoenberg’s String Trio Op 45.
Technically and musically, Schoenberg’s trio remains one of the most challenging works in the entire chamber-music repertory. It’s a fierce, densely argued 18-minute single movement in five sections, written in 1946 while the composer was recovering from a heart attack. Indeed, Schoenberg later revealed it was a depiction of his illness, even a “humorous” one, while others have claimed that it went further than that, with portrayals of the nurses who cared for him, and even of the injections they gave him.
Yet whatever the truth of these details, the trio contains some of his most intense, “difficult” music. In many ways it’s perhaps the most forbidding of all his works, with its rapid changes of mood and manner, and textures that often seem to be on the verge of disintegration. Yet if it’s never going to be an easy listen, this staggeringly assured performance by Trio Zimmermann goes a long way towards teasing out its complexities and making the structure utterly lucid, from the explosive opening to the faltering, almost provisional close.
Schoenberg’s trio received its first performance at Harvard University in 1947, in a concert that also included new works by Malipiero, Martinů, Copland and Hindemith. But by then Hindemith was a very different composer from the firebrand who had composed his First String Trio in 1924, when he was still seen as a dangerous musical radical. Today the piece seems pretty tame, and its successor, which Hindemith composed nine years later for the trio he had formed with violinist Szymon Goldberg and cellist Emanuel Feuermann, seems even more accommodating. But the Trio Zimmermann play them both with such energy, panache and attention to the minutest detail that they are totally convincing and make a perfect foil to the rigours of the Schoenberg that follows.
