Charles Petzold

The Merz Trio — consisting of Brigid Coleridge on violin, Julia Yang on cello, and Lee Dionne on piano — conducted an unusual and daring experiment in assembling their debut album, called Ink. They wanted to record Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio from 1914, but also desired to capture other impressions of Paris in that transformative year at the start of the Great War. So as sorts of comments on the music, they included other French music of the period, as well as spoken excerpts from books, poems, and diaries of the era.

Most radically, the Merz Trio broke up the four movements of their recording of Ravel’s Piano Trio with interspersed music and readings. This is certainly unorthodox, and some people might even regard it as blasphemy! It makes sense in the context of the album’s concept, but it might be quite annoying if what you want to listen to is the Ravel Piano Trio, pure and simple.

Yesterday afternoon I discovered that the concept works much better in concert, when the Merz Trio presented a program they called Ink Spills, part of the Tuesday Matinees series at Merkin Concert Hall. The concert was structured very much like the album with some notable variations, including a performance of the Gabriel Fauré Piano Trio in D minor (Op. 120) from 1923 as an extra bonus. A wireless microphone was available to the musicians to discuss the program with the audience and for the short readings.

The concert began with the Merz Trio’s own arrangement of a 1913 song by Vincent Scotto, “Under the Bridges of Paris” (later popularized by Josephine Bake) with a little “oo-oo” vocalizing by the strings. A little piano cadenza facilitated a jump two centuries back in time for arrangements of the final two selections from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s only work of chamber music, Pieces for Harpsichord in Concert from 1741, the first piece full of yearning, the second spry and joyful.

This was the first of two “pairings” in the first half of the concert; the second pairing began with an arrangement of the 20-year-old Lili Boulanger’s melancholy 1914 piano piece “In an Old Garden” followed without pause for applause with a work by Boulanger’s teacher, the Fauré Piano Trio, composed the year before he died at the age of 79. The first movement is full of wistful yearning, the bittersweet melodies of the second-movement Andantino build to a heartbreaking intensity, while the tragic opening of the three-movement finale leads to a seeming emergence from despondency and celebrating something close to joy.

Following intermission, the second half of the concert featured the Ravel Piano Trio, but broken into three parts with readings and other works between the first and second, and the second and third movements, and performed entirely without breaks for applause until the end. This became quite an interesting way of hearing this familiar work, and it wasn’t disconcerting at all, either literally or figuratively.

The first movement of the Ravel Trio begins with a lovely simple melody and later explores moments of great agitation as well as lyrical repose. This movement is based on a Basque dance called the zortziko, so after it concluded (and following a few spoken words from Jean Cocteau), we heard a lively syncopated piece called Zortziko / Fandango by the Merz Trio’s pianist Lee Dionne, and then the second-movement Scherzo of the Ravel, which has always reminded me of the demented waltz in Ravel’s La Valse.

The second movement of the Piano Trio was followed by a poem by Alain-Fournier (who was killed in action 1914 in the first month of the Great War), a lovely piece with muted strings and a wonderful interplay of piano from the 1907 “Morning” for violin and piano by Mélanie Bonis, and an arrangement of Nadia Boulanger’s yearing “Stagnant Hours” from 1910.

The return to Ravel’s Piano Trio became all the more powerful, with the wonderful slow build of the third-movement passacaglia, and the finale where something always seems to be lurking just below the surface until breaking through with an exhilerating lyrical climax. Then it was time for applause and curtain calls:

As an encore, the Merz Trio treated us to two more readings by Guillaume Apollinaire and Anna de Noailles before playing an arrangement of Debussy’s 1910 waltz for piano, “La plus que lente.”

I think this is the second time I’ve seen the Merz Trio, and I continue to be impressed by their intelligent explorations of connections between the music and the greater world. In a pre-COVID concert last year at Rockefeller University featuring Beethoven’s “Archduke” trio, violinist Brigid Coleridge talked about how this music evoked for her the friendship between Beethoven and Archduke Rudolph. Another testament to friendship in that same year of 1811 had been the subject of Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility. I was very struck by this simple connection, and I was later prompted to return to that novel, which I read aloud to my wife Deirdre earlier this year!

The Merz Trio will be back at Merkin Concert Hall on March 1, 2022, as part of the new Music Speaks series in what looks to be a fascinating program. Who knows where it may lead?