Koželuch: 3 Scottish Piano Trios

Album review

To the musical publisher George Thomson of Edinburgh, we owe thanks for having commissioned works from Hayden, Kozeluch and Pleyel at the end of the 19th century – and then from Beethoven some time later – resulting in an impressive series of works for trio with piano (and voice) based on Scottish, Irish and Welsh themes, of which today only a few hundred (all the same!) by Hayden still find their way into concert halls. That's a shame for Pleyel, Beethoven and Kozeluch, the subject of this collection, because these are some real pearls. Kozeluch had previously written around 40 piano trios, a typically Germanic genre which was aimed at educated bourgeois fans. Our composer, rather than limiting himself to harmonising songs to make short pieces, instead has brought out the whole arsenal of the sonata form, and sometimes even more, judging from the five movements from the Trio in B-Flat Major that opens this album. It should be noted that the Scottish themes are not worked into each of the movements, in particular in the first ones whose discourse remains "pure" mature Kozeluch. The three trios given here by the 1790 Trio, made up of cellist and gambist Imola Gombos, violinist Annette Wehnert and pianist Harald Hoeren (here playing a copy of a Heilmann from the end of the 18th century) date from 1798 and 1799. © SM/Qobuz