I see the kids playing outside in the sun and the snow on a cold March morning, and they look just like myself in the early 1950s playing the same way in another period, in another age… and I almost physically feel how THEN and NOW are linked together, seamlessly! There have been no breaks in time since I was that little kid playing in the sunlight on another cold day in another March in another year in another decade, though it may appear so.

I think about this when listening to this, the latest issue from quality label Daphne Records in Sweden. The CD contains a repertoire composed 1808 - 1944, but in fresh contemporary interpretations by relatively young players – but players with a long experience with an unusual talent and creativity. They have all made a name for themselves on their different instruments, and are renowned performers across the globe.

The music is piano trios by Beethoven (1770 – 1827), Ravel (1875 – 1927) and Shostakovich (1906 – 1975), and so the instruments are violin, cello and piano. The interpreters, then, are Mats Zetterqvist (b.1954) [violin], Mats Rondin (b.1960) [cello] and Mats Widlund (b. 1961) [piano].

As the CD booklet text says, the aim of this CD was to present a kind of complete concert, with three absolute highlights from the piano trio literature. In this Daphne Records has succeeded, making this one of the finest new classical recordings. There is an energy at play here, and intense identification with the material, which for some interpreters may seem weighed down by tradition and the innumerable preceding interpretations of legendary performers, easily accessible these days on historical recordings, where you can compare these interpretations with those of master musicians from the early decades of the 20th century as well as with more recent efforts. Concerning the Beethoven piece we can remember for example interpretations by Alfred Cortot [piano], Jacques Thibaud [violin] and Pablo Casals [cello]. It really is a tradition with many historical implications to learn, and then - …to forget!

Beethoven’s “Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano D major” dates from 1808, sporting the nickname “the Ghost Trio”. The popular title gets its explanation in the dark moods of the central “Largo”, which, perhaps may instigate ghostly feelings, where I, for one, just feel a certain somber, reflecting mood, containing a forceful emotional drive inside the gloominess. Wonderful art! Beethoven really could get inside his emotions and bring out unaltered feelings directly onto the score, scratching his ink across the stale paper, from where his feelings – which are universal – rise fresh and new and vibrantly alive each time the music is being played. The outer movements of Beethoven’s trio are lively and jolly events, whirling off like a dancing pillar of dust across the West Texas wastelands.

Maurice Ravel’s “Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano A minor” (1915) is a different story, also in the fact that it is divided into four movements instead of Beethoven’s three. Ravel blows hot and cold, but at all times in clear contours of architectonic tonal elaborations. There are many contrasting events, and the impression is that of a quite diverse mind, a diverse time – and at the time the First World War was raging across Europe. At a backdrop of these horrors it is a sign of hope that artists can resort to the creation of art. There is always a beginning in there somewhere, inside the creative act. There are some instances here that you might not expect from a composer who is identified with Impressionism; instances of intense clarity and miniscule perfection of detail, all readily audible – but maybe that is because we have a generally distorted view on Impressionism. Nonetheless, it is the filtering of the spirit of the times through the mind and spirit of the artist that results in the character of the resulting artwork… and consequently in the slow changing of the spirit of the times itself.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano E minor” (1944) also dates from a war, the second of the World Wars, but from the last years of it. Those were also the years of state horror being dispersed freely across the Soviet Union, originating in the paranoid mind of Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin. At any time; steps in the hall, a knock on the door – disappearance. The mood of social life was suspicion, fright – and sometimes resignation; often despair. The role of art in those circumstances was tough and questionable, as the accounts of for example Boris Pasternak show – but Dmitri Shostakovich walked a fine line and came out of the terror physically – but not emotionally – unscarred, and with a stainless dignity.
Shostakovich was a master of these chamber pieces, stuffing so much meaning and content into those intricate but clearly contoured works that they could be analyzed indefinitely. I think that it is in this trio that the peak of this CD is found, in the brilliant playing by the musicians of TrioMats and in their obvious identification with the mood of the composer.
This music gives me visions of gray, wooden houses, water puddles on gravel streets, a bleak light falling in through windows framed by embroidered curtains – and at the window a man painting on a canvas resting on an easel; the light casting slight shadows of his hand moving the brush over the canvas. There it is; art expressed as a stubborn human counter-force in relentless social or political circumstances, always maintaining the dignity of the core of human spirit, as a candle-light protected by a curved hand as it is being moved across the barn yard in a dark and windy winter’s night, when the farmer is heading for the cowshed to tender to his cattle.

The choice of material for this CD is great, the playing masterly, inspiring, the technical quality without flaws, and the recording space is interesting too; the Culture House of Ytter-Järna in Järna, south of Stockholm, Sweden – a haven for the anthroposophists, with all kinds of activities going on in those beautifully architectured and painted buildings.