i. Allegro con fuoco
ii. Scherzo
iii. Adagio sostenuto
iv. Finale: Allegretto

Chopin completed his only Piano Trio in 1829, the year in which he graduated from the Warsaw Conservatoire. It was an exciting time for the young composer: in the space of a few months he met Hummel and heard Paganini play. He also gave his début recital in Vienna and, back in Warsaw, gave the first performance of his Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor (which – confusingly – was the first of the two concertos to be written). The Trio opens with a stern series of chords marked ‘risoluto’, and the first movement is dark and impassioned. The Scherzo is more relaxed and benign, while the slow movement is quite surprising, since much of it is a dramatic dialogue between the three instruments that only occasionally blossoms into more extended melodic passages. The finale is very much in the style of the last movements of his piano concertos, written at the same time, but there’s also a ruggedness to the Trio that suggests the influence of Beethoven on the young Chopin. His letters reveal two interesting aspects of this work: firstly, it was composed quite slowly, over a the course of about a year; and second, Chopin contemplated a much more unusual scoring, using a viola instead of a violin, in order to achieve the kind of instrumental colour he was seeking here. As it turned out, he ended up with the traditional piano trio ensemble, but in 1830, a year after it was finished, he was still writing to a friend that is should be published with a viola part as an alternative to the violin, though this didn’t happen. Chopin’s Premier Trio (as it was described on the title page) was first printed by the Leipzig firm of Kistner in 1832 and in Paris and London (as his ‘First Grand Trio’) the following year, with a dedication to Prince Anton Radziwill – a name more often associated with Beethoven.

NIGEL SIMEONE 2010