The Gershom Parkington Trio
Sarah Fischer (mezzo-soprano)
Arensky was one of the comparatively new members of the modern Russian school of music who was actually a musician by profession, having been brought up to that career from his youth. Although he composed operas and other music in the larger forms, he is still best known in this. country by his shorter works, and best of all by the Trio in D minor, dedicated to the memory of the great violoncellist, Charles Davidov. The work is full of sincere elegiac feeling, and of fresh spontaneous melody.
This trio composed in 1839, when Mendelssohn was twenty-eight and a figure of considerable celebrity and influence in the musical circles of Europe, was the first of the only two trios he wrote. It had, of course, an early success, and was at once taken into the repertory, as was everything Mendelssohn cared to compose; it was, moreover, published both in England and Germany, as also was almost all Mendelssohn's work of that and later periods.
The trio is typical Mendelssohn, bright, tuneful, cleanly cut and extremely well made. There is nothing in it particularly subtle, and nothing at all emotionally deep, but it is not for that reason a work less enjoyable than many another work of genius that lacks its sunshine.