Piano Trio on Popular Melodies

Judging by his name, one might mistake Frank Martin for an Irish or British composer. He is actually Swiss by birth, though his Piano Trio on Popular Irish Melodies earns him a place on tonight’s program. Martin began his musical training like so many others—at the piano. After penning a few simple but skillful children’s songs before his tenth birthday, Martin seems to have been profoundly moved by a concert performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Even though he began his university career studying physics and mathematics—and in the Swiss climate of the early 1900s (remember Einstein) one could hardly be blamed for taking that path—Martin soon devoted himself to music full time. Between 1918 and 1926 he moved from Zurich to Paris to Rome, all the while absorbing musical influences and fleshing out a personal style. Though he eventually experimented with Schönberg’s twelve-tone compositional method, that was still a decade away when he wrote the Piano Trio on Popular Irish Melodies (1925). The trio reveals instead the influence of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, a famous composer and theorist at the University of Geneva who invented a method for teaching music fundamentals through movement. Martin taught at the Dalcroze Institute, which still is in operation today, and it was there that he perfected his mastery of rhythm.
The trio begins benignly enough: gently syncopated drone fifths on the piano against a doubled melody in the strings. Things only get more complicated from there. As the open fifths continue they take on the quality of tolling bells. Frequent tempo and meter changes are endemic to this movement, and while the strings engage in melodic counterpoint (some may recognize the folk melodies they pass back and forth), the piano glories in its role as percussion instrument. Irish tunes often have irregular grouping patterns (e.g., groups of fives and fours in alternation), but Martin far exceeds anything demanded by his folk sources.
The second movement, Adagio, opens in a poignant song-like mood for solo cello; one might note the ascending major 7th leap, which is characteristic for each reappearance of the theme later in the movement. When the cello has finished, the piano enters with new material. Martin them combines the two contrasting themes in an eerie counterpoint. The second theme material passes back and forth between violin and piano, but the cello earnestly clings to its song, sounding more and more “out of place.” The finale, a gigue, projects the Irish folk sound most clearly of all three movements. Quasi-strummed chords in the piano support the violin’s skipping, triplet-rhythm theme (Martin later inverts the roles). As the intensity mounts, the piece becomes one of the most rhythmically challenging movements in the repertory. At times I can even imagine Martin sitting at the piano (a devilish Stravinsky perched upon his shoulder), taking perverse delight in rhythmic play while the strings try to hold the thematic material together. The trio’s original commission had come from an American maecenas, though he rejected the final version for being too modern and rhythmically difficult. Hence Martin had the privilege of playing the piano part at the work’s Parisian premiere in April 1926.

(c) Jason Stell