timelapse

Anton Arensky (1861-1906)
Piano Trio No. 1, D minor
Op. 32

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Piano Trio No. 2, E minor
Op. 67

Lera Auerbach (*1973)
Piano Trio No. 1
​Op. 28

What does it sound like when 3 Russian composers compose a work for piano trio exactly 50 years apart? The davidoff timelapse invites the audience on a special musical journey through time. 

The starting point is Russia in 1894: Anton Arensky writes his 1st Piano Trio in memory of the cellist Karl Davidoff - a work that probably contains some of the most elegiac melodies of the Russian late Romantic period, but in its dramatic generosity also paints a fitting picture of its creator and his time. Thus Arensky died at a young age to the consequences caused by his dissolute lifestyle, marked by alcohol and gambling addiction, in the cultural stronghold of St. Petersburg at the time. 

Change of scenery, 50 years later: St. Petersburg is now Leningrad and the center of Shostakovich's life. In 1944, under the impression of the horrors of World War II, he composed a piano trio in memory of a deceased friend - a composition that not only allows conclusions to be drawn about the painful loss of his friend, but is also clearly an expression of the mood with which the composer perceived his present, suffering massively under the repressive measures of the Stalinist regime.

Another 50 years after: Born in Russia in 1973, the composer Lera Auerbach, a child of the globalized age, never returned to her homeland after a concert tour in the USA. Discovered early on as a child prodigy, she further developed her tonal language at the Juillard School of Music in New York. In 1994, she composed her first piano trio, in which, among many other influences, harmonic structures that refer to Shostakovich repeatedly flash up.