"Piano Trio No. 2 in C-Minor," Op 66 (1846), by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) - 4 Movements for Piano, Violin and Cello

[The Hersch]

Played by one of the great piano trio ensembles of all time, Emanuel Ax, Itzhak Perlman, and Yo Yo Ma:

 

 

You know, when I was sort of coming of age as a music lover, music of the Romantic period was very much in eclipse, and the Baroque was everything. (I'm talking about the late 1960s.) Maybe it wasn't so everywhere, but among the circle I moved in, Baroque music was praised indifferently, whether it was sublime, by J.S. Bach, or not so sublime, by Telemann or Handel or even lesser lights (and there were many, many lights so much lesser it's a wonder their work survived at all). Music after Beethoven and before, say, Stravinsky (or perhaps Mahler) was pretty much sneered at, and even Beethoven was looked at askance as having enabled Chopin and Schumann and Tchaikovsky to commit their sins against taste. I don't know what they (we?) were thinking, but then a lot of these same people idolized Laura Nyro, whose music I could never stand, so maybe I should have known better than to listen to their opinions. Consequently, I missed out for years on things like the glorious chamber music by the Romantics, of which this piano trio by Mendelssohn is one of the greatest glories. I can't really quite imagine music being more beautiful than this. I particularly love Emanuel Ax's straightforward, un-histrionic playing in this and the rest of this kind of repertoire. He'll be remembered as one of the great pianists of his generation.
 

You might want to listen to the andante of the 2nd piano trio played by these young fellows -- pretty nice, huh?

 

 

(I had originally posted a video of Ax, Perlman, and Ma performing the 2nd piano trio in front of an audience, with the slow movement of Mendelssohn's 1st piano trio given as an encore, but alas, this has vanished from YouTube. If you run across it, you should certainly watch it.)