BEETHOVEN: Piano Trio No. 1 in E-flat, Op. 1, No. 1:
i. Allegro
Suk Trio (Josef Suk, violin; Josef Chuchro, cello; Josef Hála, piano). Denon-Supraphon, recorded in Prague, December 1983
by Ken
Sometimes the eerie solitude of this space has its advantages. It is, notably, a not-so-bad place to come to be alone. And after the exhaustive purposelessness of last week's remembrance of bass John Macurdy, I have a couple of quasi-self-therapeutic goals to attempt, starting with this presentation of the opening movements of the first two of the three piano trios that make up Beethoven's Op. 1. I spent what is for me a lot of money to acquire this CD, one of two I was missing from the series of "complete" Beethoven piano trios ("complete" in quotes because of the numerous questions that come into play when we try to define what constitutes "all" of Beethoven's works for piano trios) as recorded by the Suk Trio as constituted above in the early 1980s, the dawn of the digital era, as coproduced by the Japanese and Czechoslovak companies Denon and Supraphon.
For reasons I can't begin to understand, these CDs have been out of print for ages, and the prices of used copies of some of them have risen to weird levels. Over the years I have periodically gone to the shelf to: (a) figure out which CD or CDs exactly I was missing and (b) reconnoitre online to see what it would cost to complete my holdings. Each time I eventually figured out that I was missing the CDs that contain what we traditionally think of as "the first four" Beethoven piano trios: the three trios of Op. 1 and the Op. 11 Trio, written for clarinet rather than violin but playable either way. Some of you may recall that one of the many Sunday Classics threads currently suspended in mid-air is some consideration of this very trio, Op. 11, alongside Mozart's sublime Clarinet Quintet. This may have been the proximate cause of my most recent reinvestigation of the Suk Trio Beethoven lacunae.
THE DECISION I MADE . . .
