Here’s Some Music That Stalin Banned

Stefanie Jacob (left) and Scott Tisdel (right).

A piano quartet once deemed “too serious and too challenging in technique for the general public” and a piano trio banned by Soviet authorities highlight the program as the Prometheus Trio closes its season on Monday, April 21. Guest violinist Emmy Tisdel Lohr and guest violist Nicole Swanson join Trio members cellist Scott Tisdel and pianist Stefanie Jacob.

The Piano Quartet in G Minor, K. 478 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), written in 1785 for piano trio plus viola, was one of three quartets commissioned by Mozart’s publisher and is the one that Mozart scholar Robert W. Guzman noted was seen as too complex for the general public.

“The publisher had intended the works for Vienna’s amateur musicians; the composer, it seems, did not,” writes composer/conductor Christopher Anderson-Bazzoli. “The technical demands on the performers, not to mention the complexity of the music itself, resulted in poor sales.” The publisher cancelled the contract for the remaining two works. A second quartet was subsequently published by another company, but it, too, generated little enthusiasm.

But the early reception of the quartets did not predict their future success. “We feel fortunate that we have these two gorgeous quartets to play!” says Jacob. Among the first-ever pieces scored for piano, violin, viola and cello, they are now among Mozart’s most popular chamber works. The G Minor quartet, in turns argumentative and lyrical, displays “earnestness, passion, and depth,” according to musicologist Homer Ulrich.

The second work on the program, the Piano Quartet, Op. 67 written in 1931 by Spanish pianist and composer Joaquín Turina (1882-1949), “draws on French influences for its harmonic language, but its melodic shapes belong to Spain’s Andalusia,” writes British reviewer David Truslove. “The first movement, rather than a quick sonata form, is a soulful, lilting evocation of a night in Turina’s native Seville. The second movement is dance-like, with plucked strings suggesting the clackety-clack-clack of castanets. The third movement is a broad rhapsody on Spanish melodic types and again reinterprets and reuses material from the opening.”

Jacob invites the audience to “close your eyes, and find out where the sounds take you!”

The program’s third work, once banned, is by Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). He dedicated his four-movement Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67 to the memory of his dear friend, musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, who died in 1944 at the age of 41. Violinist Timothy Judd writes, “this music seems to be much more than a contemplative elegy for a single man. It’s a haunting, universal lament, emerging amid the horrific suffering of the siege of Leningrad, the desolation of the Eastern Front, the iron-fisted artistic censorship of Stalin, and the first terrifying glimpses of the death camps of Treblinka and Majdanek.” The Trio was performed once in November 1944, and then banned by Soviet authorities.

The Prometheus Trio and guest artists will perform at 7 p.m. Monday, April 21, at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, 1584 N. Prospect Ave. Free parking is available at Milwaukee Eye Care, 1684 N. Prospect Ave. For tickets and further information, call 414-276-5760. Tickets also may be purchased online.