Location
Smetana Piano Trio in G minor, Op.15 (1855)
Schoenfield Café Music (1985)
Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884) was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style that became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood. He has been regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music. Internationally he is best known for his opera The Bartered Bride and for the symphonic cycle Má vlast ("My Homeland"), which portrays the history, legends and landscape of the composer's native Bohemia. Smetana was naturally gifted as a composer, and gave his first public performance at the age of 6. His first nationalistic music was written during the 1848 Prague uprising, in which he briefly participated. After failing to establish his career in Prague, he left for Sweden, where he set up as a teacher and choirmaster in Gothenburg, and began to write large-scale orchestral works. During this period of his life Smetana was twice married; of six daughters, three died in infancy.
The inspiration for the Piano Trio was personal tragedy. Smetana had begun to establish himself as a professional musician and teacher, opening his own music school in Prague. He married his beloved Katerina in 1849, and they lived happily together and had three daughters over the next few years. The eldest, Bedriska (known as Fritzi), born in 1851, soon showed signs of exceptional gifts. The previous year, the Smetanas had already lost one daughter to tuberculosis. And now, eight months later, Fritzi died from scarlet fever. Smetana wrote in his diary: “Nothing can replace Fritzi, the angel whom death has stolen from us.” His reaction to the loss was to throw himself into his music, producing at the age of thirty-one the first work to reveal his full power as a composer, the Piano Trio in G minor. Smetana himself acknowledged that “the loss of my eldest daughter, that extraordinarily gifted child, inspired me to write the Trio in G minor in 1855.”
Born in 1947 in Detroit, Paul Schoenfield is a quintessential American composer, combining popular, folk, and classical music forms. He began to take piano lessons at the age of six, and wrote his first composition a year later. He holds a B.A. degree from Carnegie-Mellon University and a Doctor of Music Arts degree from the University of Arizona. Schoenfield was formerly an active concert pianist, as a soloist and with groups including Music from Marlboro. “The idea to compose Café Music first came to me in 1985 after sitting in one night for the pianist at Murray’s Restaurant in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Murray’s employs a house trio which plays entertaining dinner music in a wide variety of styles. My intention was to write a kind of high-class dinner music - music which could be played at a restaurant, but might also (just barely) find its way into a concert hall. The work draws on many of the types of music played by the trio at Murray’s. For example, early 20th century American, Viennese, light classical, gypsy, and Broadway styles are all represented. A paraphrase of a beautiful Chassidic melody is incorporated in the second movement.” Irresistible and full of energy, this is caffeine-fueled music at its most entertaining.