21 May 2025 | Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung
Shocking truths
Shocking truths
The final concert of the Heidelberger Frühling’s Chamber Music Plus series for the current season could be heard as a commentary on Arnold Schoenberg’s thesis, “Music should not be beautiful, but true.” The piano trio “The Anatomy of Apathy,” written in 2024 by Danish composer Louise Alenius (born in 1978), appears like an endless flow. It dispenses with recognizable motifs, characteristic rhythms, and often even a continuous meter, and its sound alternately recalls Philip Glass and Claude Debussy. In terms of content, it leads via the movements “The force of withdrawal”, “Gradual pattern breakdown”, “Sensory fragmentation”, “Vanishing point in everyday spasms” to “Stillness as a State” thus aiming to show the path we must take in the face of the overwhelming global situation.
No less true is the Trio op. 24 by the Polish Jew Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) from 1945. Although this longtime friend of Dmitri Shostakovich managed to escape to Russia, where he lived after the Second World War, his entire family was murdered by the Nazis. With existential, emotional directness, he captures his fate and that of his people in a musical language marked by brutality and sarcasm, but also by infinite sadness. Naturally, there is no room for beauty in this exploration of the Holocaust.
The long silence after the final chord faded away made it clear how deeply the truth of this music had shaken the audience.
Beautiful Schubert
After the interval, Franz Schubert’s E-flat major trio began. It was like coming home, immersing oneself in a world of pure beauty. For a good 45 minutes, one could lull oneself into the illusion that not only the music, but the entire world could be this beautiful.
The fact that all this became so incredibly clear was thanks to Trio con brio Copenhagen’s art of interpretation, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Jens Elvekjaer (piano) and the sisters Soo-Jin Hong (violin) and Soo-Kyung Hong (cello) developed countless nuances of expression based on technical perfection, giving every single movement its own individual character. Above all, one could always sense how deeply they identified with every bar of the music.
The audience in the once again fully-packed Auditorium of the Old University expressed their gratitude with intense, final applause, interspersed with cheers of bravos. With the encore, the third movement from Antonin Dvořák’s Dumky Trio, the ensemble remained in the world of beauty. At this point, at the very latest, one could recall that almost two and a half thousand years ago, ancient Socrates thought about truth and beauty quite differently than Arnold Schoenberg. For him, they were synonyms, or rather, two sides of the same coin.
