ProStudioMasters.com

What the members of the Boulanger Trio find particularly fascinating about Litaniae is “The way Juon employs a piano trio setting to create innovative timbres, treating the instruments quite differently than other composers: for instance, the passages in which the strings play double stops and sound like an orchestra, or when he just lets the piano “sound” in its upper register... We plunge into the most profound recesses of the soul. Everything acquires existential significance. This work truly captivates us: so much occurs within such brief moments”. This is where our performers find a bridge that connects Juon’s kaleidoscopic tone poem with Pjotr Tchaikovsky’s colossal Piano Trio, op. 50, a musical epitaph for pianist and conductor Nikolai Rubinstein, who had been Tchaikovsky’s friend and mentor. Rubinstein had ensured that the young Tchaikovsky was allowed to enter the newly founded Moscow Conservatory while taking him up as a resident in his own home. “He looked after my every need like a child’s nurse”, Tchaikovsky wrote to his family in Saint Petersburg. Rubinstein not only made sure that Tchaikovsky wore appropriately elegant clothing, but he took him to the opera and to concerts while introducing him to his circle of colleagues and friends, playing out his connections to draw their attention to his protégé’s compositions. His unexpected passing in 1881, when he was only 45, must have profoundly shattered the young Tchaikovsky, who dedicated the only piano trio he ever wrote to his late friend, adding the subtitle À la mémoire d’un grand artiste.