Program Notes

Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978)
Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano (1932)

Notes for: August 14, 2012

For American audiences, Khachaturian is best known as a “semi-classical” composer whose music is most often heard at “pop” concerts. He is most famous for the “Sabre Dance” and Adagio from his ballet Gayane, the “Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia” from the ballet Spartacus, several dances from the ballet Masquerade, and his cinema music starting with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the Soviet Union, however, he was one of the most honored of composers, winning four Stalin prizes, one Lenin prize, a USSR State Prize, and the title of “Hero of Socialist Labor.” He also served as Secretary of the Board of the Composers’ Union, and as a deputy in the fifth Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. In particular, he achieved fame as the composer of concertos for members of a renowned Soviet piano trio – violinist David Oistrakh, cellist Sviatoslav Knushevitsky and pianist Lev Oborin.

But, along with Shostakovich and Prokofiev, he had his ups-and-downs with Soviet authorities. In 1948, Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, delivered the so-called Zhdanov decree condemning the three composers as “formalist” and “anti-popular”. All three were forced to apologize publicly. “My repenting speech at the First Congress was insincere,” Khachaturian subsequently recalled. “I was crushed, destroyed. I seriously considered changing professions.”

Although Khachaturian was born in what is now Georgia and lived most of his life in Russia, as a composer he achieved fame as an Armenian nationalist. Born to a poor Armenian family, he was fascinated as a boy by the music he heard around him. However, he had no formal training in music until 1921 when he moved to Moscow to join his brother, the stage director of the Second Moscow Art Theatre. Deciding to acquire a formal musical education, he enrolled in the Gnessin Institute, a private music school, and then transferred to the Moscow Conservatory in 1929.

Khachaturian maintained his interest in Armenian music throughout his musical education and his subsequent career as a composer and apparatchik. Most of his works, consequently, are saturated with ancient idioms of Armenian culture and folk music, and his stylistic innovations led to a distinct school of Armenian composers living in the Soviet Union. After his death in Moscow, he was buried in Armenia along with other distinguished Armenians, and after Armenia won its independence, he was honored by appearing on Armenian paper money.

Composed in 1932, the Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano was written while Khachaturian was still a Conservatory student. This was well before the ballets and concertos that gained him renown, but the trio is fully characteristic of his distinct Armenian style, quoting melodies and rhythms of traditional folk music.

Erik Entwistle, a musicologist at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, provides the following analysis:

“The rhapsodic first movement has gypsy-like, improvisatory qualities. The main melody, given successively to the clarinet, violin, and piano, is offset by highly ornamented passage work and cadenzas. The material is not so much developed as continuously repeated, creating a colorful yet hypnotic atmosphere.

“The second movement begins as if a scherzo, with a descending scale motive, but soon a carefree folk tune enters on the clarinet and the tempo relaxes. The agitato section which follows combines the two ideas, and a presto cadenza leads to a triumphant, ornamented return of the folk melody. The movement concludes, scherzando, as it began.

“The finale is a set of variations on yet another folk-inspired tune, with a subsidiary rhythmic figure acting as a foil and gaining in importance as the movement progresses. Both share the spotlight at the climax, after which the music gradually winds down before dissipating into nothingness.”

Copyright © 2012 by Willard J. Hertz