Trio Hochelaga - Ropartz, Rhene-Baton: Trios avec Piano (2007)

Here is a double shot of hyphenated-name, late French Romantic trios for violin, cello, and piano: the Trio in A minor of Joseph Guy Ropartz (who later went as Guy-Ropartz) and the Trio Op. 31 of (René-Emmanuel) "Rhené"-Baton. Ropartz was a long-lived disciple of d'Indy of whom conventional wisdom states waited until World War II before abandoning his post-Franckian idiom in favor of a more up-to-date neo-classic style. In regard to this trio, the conventional wisdom is more or less correct, although Ropartz is so good within his self-imposed boundaries that one hardly sees a reason for him to change; it is lusciously harmonic, never confused in terms of its forward movement, which is deeply emotional and solidly musical. Ropartz does borrow some from the language of impressionism in that this trio is neither slippery sounding or excessively chromatic; it is lean, straightforward, and propulsively rhythmic.

Although composed in 1923 and thus just five years after Ropartz's work, Rhené-Baton's trio is stylistically a world away from Ropartz's. It is resplendently impressionistic to the point of being jazzy sounding and its melodies are obviously reliant on the shape of folk melody, whereas Ropartz's source of melodic inspiration is more abstract and harder to pin down. The aspect that brings these composers together is that both are natives of Brittany, and the well-chosen front cover image, that of a lonely house situated on a vast expanse of seashore, is a very typical view that one associates with Brittany. While it is clear that Ropartz and Rhené-Baton absorbed their musical influences in different ways, they also demonstrate considerable variance in terms of how they represent their roots -- Rhené-Baton is more direct in the manner of Vaughan Williams, whereas with Ropartz is mainly a matter of atmosphere.

This hardly exhausts the streams of interest to be enjoyed in ATMA Classique's Ropartz-Rhené-Baton: Trios avec piano, not the least of which is the superb playing of the Trio Hochelaga, who has also recorded the Pierné and Fauré trios, both works stylistically close to these. Although it has been a group only since 2000, this Canadian trio takes to this early twentieth-century French chamber literature like ducks to water, and as usual, ATMA's recording is warm, vivid, and three-dimensional. If you ever felt bummed out because Ravel only wrote one trio, or that Franck only got around to writing one violin sonata, then the music on this disc will come as a delightful surprise to you.