The final concerts [of the season; corrected 5/3] in the Chamber Music at St. Peter's series in Charlotte will take place Tuesday, May 2, with one lunchtime program at 12:10 and the same program repeated at 5:30 for the after-work crowd. I'll be joining Calin Lupanu, concertmaster of the CSO, and Alan Black, principal cellist and Artistic Director of the CMSP series, for Dmitri Shostakovich's Trio No. 2 in E minor. Is there any chamber music work with piano written since 1940 that has attained "standard repertoire" status the way this trio has?

Like Tchaikovsky's trio for the same forces, this work was written as a response to the composer's grief at the death of a close friend; in this case, the critic and musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky. While the first three movements are each potent in their own way (the first with its haunting fugal opening, featuring high harmonics on the cello; the second a wild scherzo with no abatement; the third a lament in the form of a passacaglia) it is in the final movement where we get the true payoff. With its use of Jewish dance themes providing the basic musical material, it begins as an absurdly simple, almost goofy dance with pizzicato strings and pizzicato-like textures in the piano. Before it's done, we've gone from that to the most anguished chromatic pleadings from the strings against thunderous octaves in the piano. The opening theme of the entire work, pale and hollow in its original incarnation, now reappears at last in full-voiced technicolor as a fugal trio between violin, cello, and piano left hand, against a swirling cascade of sound from the piano right hand.

But the trio ends as quietly and simply as it began; when all is said and done, one of the predominant impressions of Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2 is how much he accomplishes with a sonic minimum. As a pianist, I'm always struck by that in Shostakovich's writing for my instrument, whether it be this piece, his solo Preludes, the Viola Sonata, the Piano Quintet, the 7 Songs on texts by Alexander Blok, you name it. One of his favorite pianistic devices is having a tune appear in unison in both hands, but spaced at the very extremes of the keyboard, very high and very low. The music can be very quiet and simple, but you feel the vast physical space enclosed, between the notes.

Here is some more interesting background information (via Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center) on the trio if you'd like to know more.