Program Notes: Donald Martino - Trio for violin, violoncello, and piano

​​​​Trio for violin, violoncello, and piano (2004)
Donald Martino (1931-2005)

Donald Martino is one of the great American composers of all: a master of lyricism, humor, complex polyphony, and rhythmic drama. This is deeply-felt, deeply evocative music: it is Italianate, mercurial, gorgeously melodic; it is hot-tempered and emotionally complex; it changes mood at the virtuosic drop of an especially beautiful hat.

Martino’s Trio, which is from the year before he died, displays his particular sense of harmony: though it is sometimes jaggedly atonal (in the tradition of his teachers, Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt), Martino’s language feels forcefully, romantically chromatic more than it feels serialized. One can almost connect the piece to scenes of a Verdi opera: the two musics, worlds apart, share some characterful, defining elements. Though there is considerable complexity, the music is always in motion (never static!); the tunes are romantic, emotionally forthcoming, and often shared inventively between voices; and the scene changes are sudden and irresistible. In the first minutes of the piece, we see a capricious recitative that uses the expressive range of each instrument; we see a dreamy tune in the violin and cello (a soprano and tenor duet within moments, when the curtain parts!); we see staccato, playful gestures leap around the stage as the real rhythmic complexity begins.

The Trio is in one large movement, with the echoes and bones of a four-movement classical structure built inside: a big first movement, a scherzo and slow movement, a brilliant ending. Throughout, it  follows and delights in these scenes – these deeply evocative, often thorny, always vocal scenes; and Martino’s voice shines through vividly, with a sense of lyric beauty, vulnerability, and volatility – it is music that is beautifully, familiarly human.

—Gwen Krosnick, May 2016