SYMPHONY OF THREE

For the Sitkovetsky Trio, the challenge of recording Ravel’s Piano Trio was combining three disparate solo voices to sound as one – but the reward was a performance far greater than the sum of its parts, the players tell Tom Stewart

Written two years after his sumptuous ballet Daphnis et Chloé, Ravel’s 1914 Piano Trio is a chamber reimagining of the same saturated soundscapes and exquisite forms. The composer greeted the years that followed the First World War with music of harder-edged economy, but the trio, which features alongside music by Saint-Saëns on the latest disc from the UK-based Sitkovetsky Trio, is anything but. ‘There are only three of us, so the most difficult thing is bringing together all the colours into something that makes sense as a group,’ says pianist Wu Qian. ‘Sometimes you want the sound to be unified and sometimes you want the individual voices to come through. From a technical perspective the music is soloistic, but the challenge is really to reproduce the expression on the page by creating a single idea from our separate parts.’

Ravel’s writing for the piano makes his works some of the most challenging in that instrument’s repertoire, and, as Qian says, the composer’s chamber parts demand a formidable level of skill. It’s hardly surprising that the trio has been recorded by numerous starry combinations of players as a result. ‘It’s a very forward-looking piece –a pure manifestation of Impressionism,’ says cellist Isang Enders. ‘Getting down on the recording all the detail in the score while keeping our ensemble as tight and sympathetic as possible is incredibly challenging. Plenty of combinations of soloists have recorded it but it’s the kind of music where the quality improves exponentially the more you rehearse it and get to know the people you’re playing with.’

‘IF YOU PREPARE IT IN THE RIGHT WAY IT DOESN’T SOUND LIKE THREE INSTRUMENTS BUT A HUNDRED’ –

Violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky agrees: ‘The importance of the group outweighs that of the individual, even though the parts are so demanding,’ he says. ‘If you prepare it in the right way it doesn’t sound like three instruments but a hundred.’

One way the trio has tried to achieve this is to stick religiously to Ravel’s score. ‘There are so many changes of tempo and expression, but the architecture of the piece depends on them. If we all follow what he put it becomes almost a symphony,’ says Sitkovetsky. Does following the composer’s wishes so clearly leave room for the trio to put their own mark on the piece? ‘We didn’t feel limited in any way,’ explains Qian. ‘It actually gives us a frame in which to express even more imagination, as we’re clear on the intended effect overall.’ A detailed set of performance instructions, in other words, leave room for creativity but not for arbitrary decision making.

Unlike much of his music for orchestra or solo piano, Ravel’s chamber works often lack evocative titles or programmatic elements that might help a group anchor their performance. The Piano Trio is no exception, but its four movements each allude to a different vivid image. ‘There’s the sound of the Basque Country, where Ravel’s mother came from, in the first movement,’

Sitkovetsky explains, referring to its use of the zortziko, a Basque dance form with a distinctive 3+2+3 metre. The second movement also borrows metrical structures from outside sources, in this case the pantoum, a type of poem from south-east Asia. ‘In the third movement we get a passacaglia that looks back on an older world and after that comes the finale, which is like a celebration, a dance,’ he continues. ‘Even when there’s no story the music is still so vivid.’

Above and below The Sitkovetsky Trio records Ravel and Saint-Saëns at St George’s, Bristol, in September 2019

It’s no surprise that Ravel, a master of orchestration, would suffuse his chamber works with the same intensities of sound and colour. Like Ravel, Saint-Saëns is known for his orchestral music, but it was as an organist that he had his first successes. The instrument plays a prominent role in works such as his Third Symphony and, according to Qian, its sound is never far away in the composer’s 1891 Second Piano Trio, which follows the Ravel on the disc. ‘When Isang told us that Saint-Saëns had been a famous organist, I could suddenly see it right there in the score,’ she says. ‘Organists don’t change colour through transformation; they change it by using different stops That’s just how it feels in the trio.’

‘By this point Saint-Saëns was a kind of figurehead for French music,’ Sitkovetsky explains, ‘but he’d resigned from the society he founded in the 1870s to promote it because he was unhappy about the direction it had taken.’ Even if you can’t hear it in his music, the young Saint-Saëns had been a supporter of Wagner but by the time he came to write the Second Piano Trio – when he was 56 – he had become disillusioned with the growing dominance of chromaticism that undermined traditional tonality. ‘The trio certainly looks backwards,’ continues Sitkovestky. ‘Saint-Saëns didn’t want to go down the same chromatic route as someone like Franck, and nor was he attracted by Fauré and Impressionism. He was on the outside of all that, in his own incredible sound world – which is where he stayed.’ Echoes of Mendelssohn can be heard in conversational passages between the cello and violin, while the quintuple metre of the work’s second movement has more in common with the folkinflected rhythms of Tchaikovsky than the angular contours of Ravel.

When it came to recording the work, the Sitkovetsky players felt able to control more closely how they themselves wanted the music to sound. ‘Compared to Ravel, we allowed ourselves more leeway,’ Sitkovetsky says. ‘Saint-Saëns’s score isn’t unclear, but isn’t anything like as detailed as Ravel’s. It doesn’t tell you exactly how every bar is supposed to go. We took the view that setting the right mood and expressing the feelings we thought Saint-Saëns was trying to evoke were the most important things.’ Sometimes, he says, the bigger picture would trump a small detail here or there in the score. ‘Having that perspective on the music allows you to record it in long takes which respect the architecture of the piece. It also helps with the main challenge of any recording project – giving the audience the impression that they’re listening to a live performance.’

WORKS Ravel Piano Trio in A minor; Saint-Saëns Piano Trio no.2 in E minor op.92 ARTISTS Sitkovetsky Trio RECORDING VENUE St George’s, Bristol, UK RECORDING DATES September 2019