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The Brahms Piano Trio opens this evening's concert with a little known work by Alexander Alexandrovich Alyabiev, who was born in 1787 into the noble family of the royal governor of Tobolosk, Western Siberia. The family moved to St. Petersburg in 1804, where Alyabiev began musical studies. As a young man he joined the Russian Imperial Army and took part in the war against Napoleon in 1812. In 1824 he left the army and settled in Moscow where he performed as a pianist and singer and composed for the musical theatre. In 1825 he was considered an accessory to the political disturbances connected to the Decembrists movement; as a result he was falsely arrested and accused of homicide. After a lengthy judicial process, he was exiled in 1828 to the Northern Caucasus. During his exile he became acquainted with Asian music which figured prominently in his later compositions; he was the first to introduce oriental themes and tunes into Russian music. In 1843 he received permission to return to Moscow where he spent his later years as a successful composer of stage music and opera. His work includes six opera, symphonies, overtures, and more than 160 romances, among them his song "Solovey" (Nightingale), well known from the singing lesson in Act 2 of Rossini's Barber of Seville and in sets of piano variations by Liszt and the Russian composer Glinka. Alyabiev died in Moscow in 1851.

Alyabiev began composing in the early 1820s. He wrote most of his chamber music early in his career; it displays a talent for inventive melody, instrumental part-writing, and chromatic harmonization. The Brahms Piano Trio performs the only complete movement of the Piano Trio in E-Flat, composed shortly after the War of 1812. Clearly influenced by Mozart and Beethoven, the music is accomplished and engaging.

Rachmaninoff's first piano trio, composed when was just nineteen, is without opus number, and it is not as well-known as the Piano Trio in d minor, Op. 9, which he composed as a tribute to his mentor Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky when the great master died on November 6, 1893, shortly before he was to conduct the premier performance of Rachmaninoff's symphony "The Rock."

Structurally the fifteen-minute single movement g minor trio is in sonata form; its twelve sections may be grouped as exposition (1-4), development (5-8), and recapitulation (9-12). It is written in Rachmaninoff's now familiar musical style, noted for it sumptuous melodies, rich romantic harmonies, and precise marching rhythms. Massive chordal sonorities for the piano dominate the movement, and in the exposition there is little independence of the instruments. The texture becomes more linear in the development where conversations between the instruments work out the main musical ideas.<\p>

In the Lento lugubre the piano presents the mournful first theme over accompaniment in the strings; then in a reversal of roles, the piano accompanies statements of the theme in the cello and violin. In the Piu vivo, dramatic statements of the theme in the strings are set against rising scales and forceful chords in the piano. A more pensive second theme emerges in the Con anima, first stated by the piano and then by the strings. In the Appassionato a spirited dialogue between piano and strings followed by a flourish of keyboard arpeggios concludes the exposition. In the development, contrasting sections of the haunting mournful theme and vigorous, energetic passages alternate, leading to a climactic statement of the first theme by piano and strings. After a return of exposition material, the trio concludes with a funeral march that is announced in the dark registers of the piano; a plaintive statement of the trio's opening theme in the strings brings the music to a somber close.

Born in Switzerland, Ernest Bloch was musically educated in Geneva, in Germany, and in Brussels. He spent many years in the United States, beginning in 1916; first he was the conductor for a dance company; then he became a teacher at the Mannes School, and in 1920 he became the Director of the Cleveland Institute. He took the same position at the San Francisco Conservatory in 1925. Bloch spent the thirties in Switzerland, returning to the U.S. in 1940 to teach at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until he retired in 1952.

Bloch earned his early reputation as a Jewish composer with works such as his Hebrew rhapsody Schelomo (Solomon) for Cello and Orchestra, which evokes an expansive biblical landscape in its striking gestures, large scope, and colorist orchestration. Of Bloch's early music John Gillespie says, "The very core ... is emotion, musically expressed with exaltation bordering on mysticism and rhapsodic freedom often amounting to sensuous abandon ... within a quasi-Romantic, quasi Classical frame of reference."

Richard Rognstad tells us that Three Nocturnes, composed in 1924, come from Bloch's second compositional period. Neoclassical in style and tightly knit, each is characterized by restraint in both expression and style. The nocturnes show different aspects of the night. In the first, the night, full of stars and gentle breezes, is tranquil and mysterious. Its theme continually tries to evolve out of a misty texture, but the result is more a mood than a melody. After a dark statement in the deep bass of the piano, the strings offer what appears to be a theme, but it fades as light piano figurations lead to a muted dialogue between cello and violin over mildly dissonant chords in the piano. The cello introduces a two-note phrase that appears in all the instruments before the nocturne settles into silence. In contrast, the second nocturne is a tender lullaby, its lyrical theme sung in expressive, long phrases. As the movement progresses, Bloch develops the theme in elegant canonical part writing; the mood remains calm and serene. The final nocturne suggests "the pent-up excitement of a night chase," and true to Bloch's Tempestoso marking, its opening is stormy, passionate, and impetuous. A return to the second nocturne's theme and tempo offers a brief respite, but the dark clouds return before the music dissolves into thin air.

Dvorak's Piano Trio, Op. 90 is a favorite in the piano trio literature. Composed from November 1890 until February 1891, it offers a succession of sharply contrasted moods, sustained by undisguised folk music. The nickname derives from the Ukrainian dumka (plural: dumky), a melancholy lament in ABA (slow-fast-slow) form. Structurally intriguing, Dvorak's Op. 90 was a musical experiment. Rather than composing in the sonata and rondo forms of the traditional piano trio, he cast the "Dumky" in a chain form of six parts. Clemens Romijn notes that while the musical structure appears rhapsodic, it is clearly organized. The first three dumka form a group, each flowing into the next one without pause. The three remaining dumky are separated by rests or fermatas. The elegiac fourth dumka constitutes a slow movement of sorts, the whirlwind fifth is like a scherzo, and the sixth resembles a rondo, concluding the chain with a return to the opening mood and theme of the first dumka.