Biography

Matouš Pěruška  -  violin
Kristina Vocetková  -  cello
Jan Vojtek - piano

Shortly after it was formed in 2019, the Trio Bohémo began receiving the first of many prizes and awards. This Czech ensemble first created a stir at the Gianni Bergamo Award in Lugano, Switzerland, where it was awarded second prize. Due to this success, the trio was accepted into the Le Dimore del Quartetto network, which later awarded the Trio the prize for Ensemble of the Year 2021. In the same summer the group received several special prizes at the International Summer Academy Festival in Vienna, and just a few days later first prize at the Filippo Nicosia International Award in Briosco, Italy. In 2021, Trio Bohémo received both first prize and audience prize at the International Johannes Brahms Competition in Pörtschach, Austria, and only a few weeks later the International Parkhouse Award in London. On and on goes the list of prizes and awards: recent ones have accrued in Weimar, Melbourne, Munich, Vilnius, and Prague. “Freshness and energy … utterly convincing” were the words The Guardian used to describe the Trio’s debut recording of masterpieces by Schubert and Smetana. Following the Trio’s Wigmore Hall debut in London, one critic proclaimed that “They are the music that this world needs.” The Trio returns to North America for its third visit in less than a year, and for its first time in Canada. LMMC debut.

https://www.triobohemo.com/

Notes

A famous composer’s Op. 1 is always a matter of interest, no matter how slight it may be. In Beethoven’s case, however, he waited until he was confident that what he had to offer was truly worthy, and he was quite correct in this regard. Beethoven probably started working on the three trios of Op. 1 while still living in Bonn, and continued working on them after moving to Vienna in late 1792. We do not know precisely when they were first performed, but probably they were played sometime in 1793 or 1794 at the home of one of Beethoven’s early patrons, Prince Carl Lichnowsky, with the composer at the piano.

Wartime conditions in 1944 served as a backdrop for the grim circumstances surrounding the birth of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio. Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) was under siege by the Germans, who threatened the entire country. Reports filtered in about the atrocities the Nazis were perpetrating on the Jews in concentration camps. It was not a happy time for Russia, or for Shostakovich, and the Trio became one of his most tragic and powerful utterances, deeply imbued with elegiac feeling, a worthy successor to piano trios by two other great Russians, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Shostakovich’s Trio also represents an extremely rare case of a composition dedicated to a music critic, in this case Ivan Sollertinsky (1902-1944), who was also a musicologist, linguist (he knew dozens of languages, including ancient Persian and Sanskrit) and close friend of the composer.

Aside from two slight, single-movement works, Schubert avoided writing for the medium of the piano trio until he created the two mature masterpieces Opp. 99 and 100, both in 1827, the year before his death. If the public today holds a slight preference for the B-flat trio (No. 1), this is countered by Schubert’s own preference for the other. Both reflect the composer’s study of similar works by Mozart and Beethoven in their refined compositional technique and equal partnership of three instruments. The E-flat trio is laid out on even more expansive lines than the B-flat trio. Lasting about forty minutes in performance, it is longer than any Schubert symphony except the Great C major. Although it does not contain as many beguiling themes as does the B-flat trio, it has even fuller textures (at times almost symphonic in scope), greater brilliance (all those arpeggios, chromatic scales and trills in the first and final movements!) and more breadth to the development sections. This Trio formed part of the only public concert Schubert ever gave in Vienna. It took place in the hall of the Musikverein on March 26, 1828 (a year to the day after the death of Beethoven). The concert was an artistic and financial success.

Robert Markow