BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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Discovering Music

Music: Classical

Programme which examines a different piece of music each week

Programme which examines a different piece of music each week, looking at the musical form or the composer's style, and exploring the many things contributing to the overall experience

Discovering Music: Shostakovich Piano Trios

11/10/2009

Shostakovich Piano Trios

BBC Radio 3 - Discovering Music, Shostakovich Piano Trios

Stephen Johnson on the intricacies of Shostakovich's two trios for piano and strings.

Stephen Johnson is joined by the Kungsbacka Trio at Wootton Upper School in Bedfordshire for an exploration of Shostakovich's two piano trios.

Stephen Johnson visits Wootton Upper School in Bedfordshire for an exploration of Shostakovich's two very different trios for piano and strings. The first was written in 1923 when the 17-year old composer was a student at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. At that time, Shostakovich often played music to accompany films at a local cinema, and his sister remembers Shostakovich being booed and whistled by the paying audience when he and his friends tried playing the trio along to the movies! 
A recording of the slow movement of Shostakovich's second trio was played at the composer's memorial service in 1975; it's a much more mature work, full of emotion, but also full of sardonic humour: grotesqueries which act as thinly veiled stabs at the Soviet dictatorship of Jozef Stalin. 
It also contains some fascinating Jewish music in the finale - something Shostakovich had been particularly intrigued by in his middle years: "Jewish music has made a most powerful impression on me. I never tire of delighting in it; it is multifaceted, it can appear to be happy when it is tragic. It is almost always laughter through tears".
The programme ends with a complete performance by The Kungsbacka Trio, of Shostakovich's Piano Trio No.2 in E minor, Op.67.

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