音樂視頻：貝多芬的《三重協奏曲》

貝多芬的《三重協奏曲》
Beethhoven's Triple Concerto for Piano, Violin, and Cello in C, Op. 56 

 還是在大學畢業一年多後的1988年秋季的某一天的夜裏8點多鍾，我獨自一人乘公共機車到袁建國先生在其結婚後在江漢區離長江邊不太遠的一所單間老房子成就的婚房新家。這裏離他原在六合裏的老單間房不遠。
    那天晚上我們照樣聊起了音樂。我問他最近都聽些什麽。他告訴我說正在聽貝多芬的《三重協奏曲》和《D大調莊嚴彌撒》。我說，哇，這些作品恐怕還不適合我聽吧。我那時剛入門沒幾年，主要聽一些古典和浪漫派音樂中比較“通俗易懂”的作品。這兩個作品應該不是像我這樣沒有音樂教育背景的入門者所能接受和欣賞得了的。不過，他的一席話深深地烙印在了我的腦海裏，我發誓等到我有了對西方經典音樂更好的感受能力後一去要聽它們。
    介紹貝多芬的《英雄的15個主題變奏和賦格曲》的博文《音樂欣賞：原汁原味的英雄 》裏，我曾提到大約是在1993年秋季的一天，我去武漢的老展覽館看音像製品銷售展。正是在那天，我在大量的音像製品中發現了一張PILZ公司出品的CD，編號是DDD 160 179，CD名為Vienna Master Series, Digital-Classic，其中包含兩部貝多芬的作品。第一部就是由莫斯科人三重奏團（Moskauer Trio/Violin, Cello and Piano）與斯洛文尼亞的盧布爾雅那交響管弦樂隊（Rundunk-Sinfonic-Orchester Ljubljana / Conductor: Lutz Herbig）合作的貝多芬的《三重協奏曲》。那個版本成了我日後反複聆聽的唯一版本，所以，非常的喜愛。盡管樂隊的音質有時有點兒粗糙，樂隊的氣勢也不夠宏大（其實這部作品原本並不需要氣勢宏大的樂隊），但久聽成癮，已經完全不介意是否有更好的版本了。我堅信，一個音樂作品是否好壞與演奏者沒有多大的關係，而是由作品本身決定的。因此，一個錄音版本隻要是由一個熟練的專業演奏者演奏的，我都會認真接受和欣賞。
    聆聽這部作品可能不需要激情般的體驗，你需要的是冷靜的沉思，由此你有可能會從中發現某種崇高的因素（尤其是在第二樂章中，這種情愫非常的強烈）、深刻的哲理以及多重概念之間的複雜的邏輯聯想。

 The triple concerto is dedicated to Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian von Lobkowitz. The triple concerto would seem to have been composed between April-September 1804. It received its first known performance in May 1808, and was published in 1807 in Vienna, yet it had already been anticipated in 1802 by fairly substantial sketches for a work in D, calling for the same team of soloists. It may have been intended for a concert in spring of that year. However, the director of the theatre cancelled the concert, leaving Beethoven to turn his attention to the opera.
        After a difficult boyhood in Bonn, Beethoven had chosen to settle in his adoptive Vienna, and in the space of five or six years (making much allowance for the gestation and lengthy reworking of his ideas) produced a quantity of masterpieces astonishing by any standards, including the third symphony, the Waldstein and Appassionata sonatas, Fidelio, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the three Razumowsky Quartets and the Violin Concerto. At this time he was coming to terms with increasingly "meaty" sonata-form structures. The Waldstein and the triple concerto display the lengthiest first movements he had undertaken by that time, and several ideas in the concerto may have been distilled from the piano sonata.

Triple concerto in C major: first movement – Allegro：

 The forces are both unusual and formidable, and the scale of the triple concerto is correspondingly grand. The first movement has over 530 bars (nearly half of them in C major), and the third is virtually as substantial, with just under 500 bars. The opening of the Allegro is spectacularly quiet and unobtrusive: six bars' worth of cello and double bass provide the material for a vast paragraph before the cello, violin and piano appear successively in a tonic-dominant-tonic order respectively.
        The lion's share of the development is initiated by the string soloists, the piano behaving obediently and without undue pomp. The technical problems of balance between resources (violin, cello, piano, orchestra) are solved here by an unusual paucity of chordal writing for the piano. The chords actually played by the piano can almost be counted on the fingers of two hands. There is much liberal use of unison semiquavers, or thirds, sixths and tenths, sometimes at the double or triple octave placed above or below the strings so as not to hinder their own tessitura. The very first entry is in octaves only (as is also the case in the two following movements) with only a little arpeggio work, and some thirds in broken octaves when the piano is flexing its muscles.
        Some of the stormiest passages contain triplet arpeggios in contrary motion, but the rest is virtually all two-part polyphony, in scale passages, or arpeggio work plus some discreet quasi Alberti-bass activity by way of varying the texture. The Violin and Cello Sonatas display similar restraint in their allegro movements, the texture being largely a two-part affair. In place of the usual cadenza just alter the recapitulation comes an animated dialogue between the piano trio members with unobtrusive support from the orchestra, and the movement closes with a brief coda. A similar formula is proposed in the third movement.

Triple concerto in C major: second movement - Largo：

 The slow movement (Largo) is in the key of the flattened submediant (C-A flat-C), a relationship also encountered in the First Piano Concerto and the Emperor (E flat-B-E flat). The thematic material is presented shortly after the opening by the cello (playing in such a high register that it constitutes the soprano voice of the texture) accompanied by muted strings, while the piano joins in much later and provides extremely delicate and remarkably discreet unison arpeggio figuration most of the time. There is not a single chord in the entire movement, only four bars of broken chord patterns.
        The movement itself is short, albeit with dramatic potential, leading directly (perhaps a backward glance at the Waldstein?) into the Rondo alla Polacca (there are similar links between the corresponding movements of the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos).

Triple concerto in C major: third movement - Rondo alla Polacca：

The lively Polacca theme is entrusted to the cello, playing on the treble stave and the accompaniment is provided by the strings at a lower pitch, exactly as in the largo. The piano is content to play in octaves, just as in the two previous movements. The rest is a model of clarity, with no more than three or four bars of cadential punctuation.
        Otherwise considerable use is made of single and double broken octaves, elegantly varied with arpeggios and trills.
        Only a composer thoroughly versed in the production of chamber music and attentive to the needs of other instruments could have produced such a finely crafted texture 

卡拉揚早期版：20世紀四巨頭的世紀聯決版：

第二樂章

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f79m_Ow0pSM&feature=related
http://youtu.be/f79m_Ow0pSM  

第三樂章

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psfvkJLkJzM&feature=related
http://youtu.be/psfvkJLkJzM  

卡拉揚後期完整版：Ludwig van Beethoven/Triple Concerto
      Herbert von Karajan/Berliner Philharmoniker
          Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin)
          Mark Zeltser (Piano)
          Yo-Yo Ma (Cello)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_z6jo8nMZs&feature=related

http://youtu.be/K_z6jo8nMZs

[周遊世界]

完全同意你的評價，卡拉揚指揮的俄國三位傑出音樂家演出的貝氏三重奏也一直是我的最愛。謝謝推薦！

[megchen]

Thanks for sharing. The introduction for Beethoven's Triple Concerto in this post is very detailed.

I happened to have 卡拉揚早期版. It’s included in Herbert von Karajan - Complete EMI Recordings 1946-1984. It's very precious. It's one of the highlights in this collection.

I am afraid 卡拉揚後期完整版 is also very good.