Concert by the Frivolités parisiennes

Public premiere of the Trio en fa majeur for violin, cello and piano by Reynaldo Hahn

The concert by the Frivolités parisiennes, "Une soirée au salon de Madeleine Lemaire", will take place on Thursday 23 January at 7pm at the Mairie du XIe arrondissement in Paris.

It is organised in collaboration with the Société Reynaldo Hahn, whose president is Philippe Blay.

"Besides Caplet and Schmitt, the programme will feature an arrangement by Philippe Perrin for harp and string quartet, with a narrator, of the Portraits de peintres and, in its public premiere, the first movement (Allegro con moto) of the Trio en fa majeur, for violin, viola and cello by R. Hahn, composed in part at Beg-Meil at the end of the summer of 1895.

Dedicated to the wife of Gustave Lyon, the director of the Pleyel piano manufactory, Reynaldo Hahn's Trio en fa majeur, for violin, cello and piano, is linked to the stay he made with Marcel Proust in Brittany, at Beg-Meil, at the end of the summer of 1895. As the composer wrote in his diary, he "scribbled it on the dining-room table while Marcel strove to make [him] admire Sartor Resartus", a "tough" novel by Thomas Carlyle. Only the first movement, Allegro con moto, was ever completed, and was probably performed privately, as the deterioration of relations between Hahn and Proust from 1896 onward gave rise in the composer to ambivalent feelings towards this trio, which he had "kept attached to him for whole days by bonds impossible to break" (Journal).

Not greatly drawn to chamber music at that time, Hahn nonetheless displays in this opening Allegro a clear sense of proportion and thematic organisation. Departing from the traditional construction that opposes several themes before developing and restating them, he arranges the movement's three parts to create a strong contrast between the central section and those framing it; the last combines all the musical ideas already heard while returning to the original theme. The composer confided that he wished to convey the journey "of two souls originally harmonious, united, that have become discordant". After the evocation of "memories of what their love once was, but made ugly, distorted by their present state", their path then ends "against a backdrop of indifference" (Journal)."

Philippe Blay