RENAUD CAPUÇON / GAUTIER CAPUÇON / MARTHA ARGERICH

Haydn’s Trio No. 39 is original in more ways than one: in addition to the popular influences that have earned it the subtitle ‘Gypsy’, it breaks away from traditional sonata form to develop a spring-like cantilena, in which the strings are grafted one after the other onto a refined piano line. 

As for Shostakovich’s Second Trio, it synthesises some of the finest techniques of Romantic and modern music: cyclical form (with the dramatic return of the opening theme of the first and third movements in the Finale), recourse to the popular imagination (the melody that opens the slow movement could easily be mistaken for a folk song from Eastern Europe), to which Shostakovich adds his eternal sense of the tragicomic, wry humour and repetition. The hammering out in the Finale of the short five-note motif that had already haunted the entire movement seems to give a new definition to the representation of madness in music.  

Nothing of the sort in Mendelssohn’s no less legendary First Trio: with a methodically tested sense of rhetoric, the Leipzig prodigy leads listeners, starting with a bubbling melody in the cello, through a musical form conceived in a single breath, channelling a formidable creative energy with a rare economy of means, foreshadowing his later masterpieces, first and foremost the Quartet Op. 80. A work that has made the reputation of many ensembles, from the Beaux-Arts Trio to the Rubinstein-Heifetz-Piatigorski Trio, here reconsidered through the prism of the complicity of twenty years of partnership on stage and behind the scenes with these 3 major Verbier Festival performers.