“Café Music” – PIAZZOLLA: Four Seasons of Buenos Aires; Le Grand Tango; PAUL SCHOENFIELD: Café Music; TURNA: Trio No. 2 in B minor; GERSHWIN: It Ain’t Necessarily So – Trio Solisti piano trio – Bridge 9296, 64:42 [Distr. by Albany] ****:
The CD’s title might allude to a much more informal sort of collection of popular melodies for a small ensemble, but it is a quite serious though very enjoyable program of two major works composed for piano trio and two by Piazzolla arranged for that combination. The Four Seasons was one of Piazzolla’s works in which he transformed the tango into a serious form of music. It also alludes to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with a similar construction based on seasons in the composer’s home base. Piazzolla originally wrote the piece for violin, electric guitar, piano, bass and bandoneon; this arrangement for piano trio was created by the violinist in the trio and Argentine cellist/composer José Bragato. It works very well in the less ethnic instrumentation and therefore leans even further in the direction of serious classical chamber music.
Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango is one of his masterpieces, commissioned by Rostropovich and premiered by the cellist in 1990. In this arrangement it has been expanded to include the violin. In spite of the strong emotional content and knocking sounds, it moves even closer to classical music than the Four Seasons. The Paul Schoenfield piece provided the stimulus for this Trio Solisti CD, bringing together classical and popular in artistic ways. The idea came to the composer while sitting in a restaurant in Minneapolis one night. He wanted to write a sort of high-class dinner music that could be played in a restaurant as well as the concert hall. One reviewer described it as having one foot in Tin Pan Alley and the other in central European high Romanticism. Among the influences to be heard in the work are ragtime, jazz, Piazzolla, Poulenc and Hassidic song.
The 1926 trio of Joaquin Turina became part of the program due to his mixing of popular, folk and classical. He was associated with music of the Basque regions as well as Spanish music, and as a child was nuts about the accordion – a close relative of the bandoneon. His Trio shows the influences of Debussy, Ravel and Franck, and uses some Basque rhythms. The Trio Solisti are fine performers – to be complimented for their creative programming – and the sonics are fine.
– John Sunier
