The Rijeka Piano Trio was founded in 2016 on the initiative of Filip Fak, Krunoslav Marić and Vid Veljak, musicians who received their first musical education in Rijeka, and who, along with intensive musical collaboration, have long-standing friendships. Although the Trio is a very young ensemble, the musicians who make it up already have plenty of experience in chamber music, as well as in solo concerts. In addition to interpretations of works of world music literature, the Rijeka Piano Trio pays great attention to the performance of works by Croatian composers.
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Joseph Haydn:
Piano Trio No. 39 in G Major, Op. 82 No. 2, Hob. XV:25 "Gypsy"
Andante
Poco adagio
Finale. Rondo all'Ongarese, Presto
Gaetano Donizetti:
Piano Trio in E-flat Major D 929
Largo – Allegro
Largo
Andantino (quasi Allegretto)
Alfi Kabiljo:
Liburnian trio - suite for flute (violin), cello, and piano
Prelude
Legend
Finale
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Antonín Dvořák:
Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor, Op. 90 “Dumky“
Lento maestoso in E minor
Poco adagio in C-sharp minor
Andante in A major
Andante moderato in D minor
Allegro in E-flat major
Lento maestoso in C minor
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Joseph Haydn (Rohrau, 1732 – Vienna, 1809) spent thirty years in the service of the Esterházy family (of Prince Nikolaus, to be more precise), where he found his answer to the common dilemma among composers: permanent employment and composing on demand or creative freedom and financial insecurity. Before his employment at the Esterháza estate, spanning from 1761 to 1790, Haydn was a highly esteemed independent composer in Vienna, where he was also exceptionally prolific: his output includes 104 symphonies, 83 string quartets and 32 pieces for mechanical clock (Flötenuhr, table or larger ornamental clock containing mechanical organ, the sound of which could be ‘programmed’). He was ‘the sanest and most balanced of composers’, according to the author Erik Tarloff, whose ‘intentions are always clear, his procedures always limpid.’
Haydn enjoyed the status of a celebrity in England, where he stayed for two longer periods (1791–92 and 1794–95), which he described as some of the ‘happiest days of his life’, probably because they enabled him some distance from the routine of his life as a Kapellmeister in Austria. In England, he wrote 12 symphonies and nine piano trios. In 1795 he composed three piano trios, including this evening’s Piano Trio in G major, Hob. XV:25, which became very popular, mostly because of the final movement. He dedicated the trios to Rebecca Schroeter, a pianist he taught.
The piano largely dominates in these works, which Haydn originally titled ‘sonatas for the pianoforte with accompaniment of violin and violoncello’. The violin and piano often play in unison, although the violin occasionally has a melodic line of its own. The piece was nicknamed after the final Rondo: the musical material of Hungarian origin was interpreted by the London audiences as Rondo in the Gipsies' Style, while Haydn wrote Rondo all´Ongarese above the movement. It is interesting that it was in London, from a distance, that he reached for Hungarian-Roma-Balkan music, which he had probably heard at Eszterháza. He used similar themes in some of his ‘London’ symphonies.
The Ongarese is preceded by the singing Andante with variations of both themes, followed by the even more ‘singable’ cavatina. The London concert audiences, like many others that followed, would be firmly anchored in one type of expression after the first movements, and then the third movement would surprise them with a touch of rustic Hungarian sound. The main, returning theme, quietly brings something new and livelier, while the Rondo episodes flare up louder. In his nod to ‘Romungro’, one of the first in classical music, Haydn uses themes of Hungarian origin, but also some composing procedures, for example, associations to drone bass from folk music. Traditional music invaded the Trio, remaining, however, within the Austrian-English framework.
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (Bergamo, 1797 – 1848), one of the most important Italian opera composers of the first half of the nineteenth century, wrote that he ‘flew away like an owl’ from the poverty of his home, although his father always said that it was impossible to work as a composer’. Donizetti studied music in Bergamo, in the school of the Bergamo Cathedral maestro di cappella Simon Mayr, who later continued to be his mentor. After studying at the Bologna Conservatory, he often stayed in Naples, writing for local theatres, where he also served as director. He wrote operas for Rome, Florence and Paris. From 1834 he served as professor at the Naples Conservatory, later also as temporary director, but was never offered full tenure. After a series of personal tragedies, deaths of his new-born children and wife, Donizetti moved to Paris in 1838, where he achieved great success, especially with his operas La fille du régiment and La favorite. He also composed for Vienna (Linda di Chamonix), where he was appointed court Kapellmeister. His final days were marked by worsening symptoms of syphilis. In his lifetime, he saw sixty of his operas premiere, while some of them were discovered after his death. He developed dramatic weight and emotional content of the opera seria genre, as well as ways of conveying sparkling brightness and fluidity in opera buffa.
Donizetti he also wrote sacred music, especially in his youth, piano pieces, sinfonie, and 19 string quartets, which are his best-known non-operatic works. Many of his chamber works were originally intended for home performances: Donizetti wrote the Piano Trio in E flat major in 1817, and in the manuscript he indicated that the work was dedicated to the Betti family from Bologna, with whom he often played music in the evenings at that time. A short, introductory Largo is followed by a lovely Classical allegro; tonight's complete work was actually reconstructed from Donizetti's found fragments.
The versatile Croatian composer Alfi Kabiljo (Zagreb, 1935) is also a conductor, arranger, pianist, lyricist, librettist and producer. He attended the private music school of the Croatian composer and pedagogue Rudolf Matz, graduated from the Vatroslav Lisinski Music School in Zagreb, and studied composition in Paris. He has a degree in architecture.
He is a composer of international reputation with a wide range of creativity – he writes music for theatre, film, TV, light music, chansons, orchestral, chamber and solo works. He recorded his albums and film music in Barcelona, Vienna, London, Los Angeles, Ljubljana, Madrid, Paris, Tokyo, and mostly in Zagreb. He wrote music for 80 feature films and more than 100 television episodes. He wrote numerous popular songs and chansons, which have been recorded around the world, and was a participant, and in many of them the winner, of 38 international festivals. Due to successes such as Yalta, Yalta, the press called him ‘the king of Croatian musical’.
Kabiljo's many recognitions (Josip Štolcer Slavenski, Porin...) include numerous awards for film music, and he was also nominated for a BAFTA award. In 2023, he received the Golden Octavian Award of the Croatian Society of Film Critics, for Lifetime Achievement. The year before, he received the Camille International Award, awarded by the European Composers and Songwriters Association (ECSA).
Along with stage and pop hits and film music, classical music was always on Kabiljo's radar. A few years ago, in an interview with Irena Paulus for the website glazba.hr, he said that in his childhood he listened to his parents' records with the works of Stravinsky and Ravel, and later he went to the Warsaw Spring festival where he was introduced to the works of New Music. As a composer, he points out, it all started with the music he wrote for Lordan Zafranović's film Prvo pijanstvo, which was played by musicians from the Zagreb Philharmonic. Then he was recognised as a ‘serious’ composer and started getting commissions. Recently, he has been writing more chamber music, and he points out that he likes to write for various ensembles. His works are often performed by the piano duo D&B, Radovan Vlatković and Renata Penezić, who encouraged him to create this evening’s piece:
The Liburnian Trio is a suite from 2013, for flute, cello and piano. Writing about Kabiljo's album Komornijada (Cantus), musicologist Jagoda Martinčević pointed out that ‘colleagues and critics consider Liburnian Trio one of Kabiljo's best works’. He wrote it at the instigation of the ‘great multiflutist’ Renata Penezić, for the Osor Trio, which also includes Petar Kovačić and Zarija Alajbeg Galuf.
Martinčević asserted that in this piece, Kabiljo ‘again evokes of Istrian traditional music in a three-movement story from the distant past of Liburnia. The legend of the love between a Roman legionnaire and a beautiful village girl from Vinež fuels his fantasy, which, through thick cello lines, the transparent sound of the flute and a solid piano backing reveals a classically conceived trio of exemplary structure, great melodic invention and playful danceability.’
Antonin Dvořák (Nelahozeves, 1841 – Prague, 1904) played the violin and viola as a young man, then worked as a butcher's apprentice, simultaneously learning to play the organ, and later entered the Prague Organ School. After graduation, he earned his living playing the viola in small orchestras and restaurants, later as an organist and teacher, and several times received state scholarships for the arts, which were awarded to him by a jury that included Brahms and Hanslick. Brahms recommended his works to his publisher, which helped popularize them and ensured Dvořák more performances, with the Slavonic Dances and Rhapsodies being especially popular. Not wanting to leave Bohemia, he refused to move to Vienna, but instead traveled for performances and publications (insisting with publishers that the titles and other markings should always be written in Czech, not just German); his music eventually became very popular in England. He conducted some performances of his works himself, and he taught composition at the Prague Conservatory. After that, he lived in New York for three years (also teaching), where his works were well received, and he himself drew on American musical influences.
His great role model was Brahms, which is evident in his preference for rich, absolute music, symphonic music, but also in his great interest in chamber music. On the other hand, he often colored his late romantic style with national color and ‘warm’ melodies, primarily with a harmonic texture. Among other things, he wrote nine symphonies, one concerto for piano, one for violin and one for cello, Slavic dances for orchestra, 11 operas, arz songs, 14 string quartets and other chamber works, including four for piano trio.
Dvořák did not specifically call his piece for piano trio, Op. 90, ‘Piano Trio’, but Dumky – to emphasize that it is a series of dances based on the Ukrainian dumka (dumka – singular – is the diminutive of duma, an epic or ballad of Ukrainian origin). In all these dances, fast and slow parts alternate, there are six of them – and all, except one, start with a slow part. The slow parts are narrative, wistful, and the fast ones bring a dance movement – with short motifs and sliding chromatics. The first three dumkas follow attacca one after the other, forming something of a tripartite first movement; the remaining three can be compared to a slow movement (4th), a scherzo (5th), and the 6th is a simple finale. Although it has simple form and theme, because the center is the alternation of fast and slow and the work does not contain standard thematic development, or variations, Dumky brings richness of expression and refined sound and compositional technique.
The Rijeka Piano Trio was founded in 2016 by Filip Fak, Krunoslav Marić and Vid Veljak, artists who began their musical education in Rijeka, and who, along with maintaining intensive musical collaboration, have been long-time friends.
Although the Trio was founded relatively recently, its members are experienced chamber musicians and soloists. Filip Fak is an assistant professor at the Academy of Music in Zagreb and has recently been appointed director of the Zagreb Philharmonic. He is also the president of the Croatian Society of Music Artists. Krunoslav Marić is a member of the Zagreb Soloists and president of the Board of the Zagreb Soloists. He teaches violin at the Vatroslav Lisinski Music School in Zagreb. Vid Veljak has recently become a member of the Zagreb Soloists and is an assistant professor of cello at the Arts Academy in Split.
The Trio gave its first concert in October 2016 in Rijeka, in the Hall of the Italian Community. The concert was a great success, after which they toured seven cities in China, including Beijing and Shanghai, where they gave very successful and acclaimed performances.
The Rijeka Piano Trio has appeared in Zagreb, at the Osor Musical Evenings, and in other Croatian cities. They often perform in Rijeka, in venues such as the Hall of the Italian Community, the Hall of the Maritime and History Museum of the Hrvatsko Primorje Region and the Croatian National Theatre Ivan Zajc. One of their most notable appearances was in the Saturday at Lisinski series at the Vatroslav Lisinski Hall in Zagreb in March 2022, where they performed the works of Gustav Mahler with the renowned Croatian mezzo-soprano Renata Pokupić. The Trio also performed in a concert dedicated to Marko Ruždjak, organised by the Croatian Composers Society.
In addition to the works of international composers, the Rijeka Piano Trio is deeply dedicated to performing Croatian composers.
