Customer Reviews

Great Piano Trios

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This music went through a long period of being little known, but is gradually being rediscovered. And it's a good thing, since listeners who know these works consider them to include some of the finest music of the entire Classical period. For instance, Charles Rosen, in his excellent book _The Classical Style_, devotes an entire admiring chapter to these trios.

The amateur pianist will find that with a few exceptions the music is not all that hard to play. Haydn wrote these works primarily as piano music, with the violin only occasionally taking a solo, and the cello hardly ever. This compositional style has been taken as a basis for criticism of the work, but in fact, music for piano with other instruments "obbligato" was quite common in Haydn's day--for instance, Mozart's violin sonatas work the same way. In event, the consequence of this piano-dominance is that as an amateur pianist you can enjoy playing these works even if you can't find friends who play violin or cello to help you out.

As for this Dover edition, it has the usual great virtue of Dover reprints (very low price), and the defect of it being a reprint of a rather old, now out-of-copyright edition. The other defect is that it only includes about half of the mature Haydn piano trios, and omits equally fine ones. I'd really like to see Dover issue the others as well.