Tetzlaff-Tetzlaff-Dörken Trio
The Helen Coplan Harrison Concert
Location: Shriver Hall
A brilliant trio of musicians—violinist Christian Tetzlaff, cellist Tanja Tetzlaff, and pianist Kiveli Dörken—come together for a rare U.S. tour. The Grammy nominated group is heralded as “richly satisfying” (The Boston Globe) with a “combined musical voice that speaks with incontestable integrity” (The Washington Post). Their program features Schubert’s B-flat Trio, a radiant masterpiece.
“It was sophisticated music making, joyously conveyed and received in kind, a rare and memorable evening” – The WholeNote
About the sponsor
This concert endowment was established in 2002 in honor of longtime Shriver Hall Concert Series Board member Dr. Helen Harrison, a gift by her sons Dr. Stephen Harrison and Dr. Richard Harrison and their families. Helen Harrison joined the Shriver Hall Concert Series Board of Directors in November 1973 at the invitation of founding president Ernest Bueding. Dr. Harrison served as an active and influential member of the Board until 2001, and she was responsible for bringing many new members to the Board, including chair emerita Jephta Drachman. As a scientist, Dr. Harrison shared the prestigious Howland Prize with her husband, Dr. Harold Harrison, for research done at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Tetzlaff-Tetzlaff-Dörken Trio
Christian Tetzlaff, violin
Tanja Tetzlaff, cello
Kiveli Dörken, piano
Originally comprised of violinist Christian Tetzlaff, cellist Tanja Tetzlaff and pianist Lars Vogt, the Trio made their debut performance at the Rheingau Festival in summer 2004. Since then, they have performed to great acclaim in many of the major music centers in Europe and North America.
The Trio made their North American debut in February 2010 and since then have appeared in New York’s Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Orange County, Vancouver, Denver, Toronto, Princeton, Yale, and the Library of Congress. During their fourth North American tour in the 22/23 season, they return to San Francisco for three performances and make their debuts at Duke University as week as in Baltimore, Houston and Troy, NY and at New York City’s 92nd Street Y.
Equally busy internationally, the Trio has performed in Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt, Bilbao, and Luxemburg among other cities.
The Trio’s first recording of the three Brahms Trios for Ondine received stellar reviews and was nominated for a Grammy. Their second recording, also for Ondine, featured the Dvorak Piano Trios and was released in the fall of 2018. Their next release with be the Schubert Piano Trios in November 2022, also for Ondine.
In September 2022, Lars Vogt tragically passed away from cancer. Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff asked pianist Kiveli Dörken to join them for this tour. The Tetzlaffs and Lars Vogt worked with Ms. Dörken playing chamber music and recitals for many years and we are all grateful that she has made herself available to participate in the tour.
This tour is dedicated to the memory of Lars Vogt.
Christian Tetzlaff, violin
Equally at home in the repertoire of classical and romantic music as well as the 20th century, Christian Tetzlaff has set standards with his interpretations of the great violin concertos with the world’s greatest orchestras. As a soloist and chamber musician, he regularly gives guest performances in all the major international music metropolises. He plays a violin by Peter Greiner. His website is christian-tetzlaff.de.
Tanja Tetzlaff, violoncello
Tanja Tetzlaff performs as a soloist and chamber musician throughout Europe as well as in the USA, Australia, and Japan and is a regular guest at international festivals. Ms. Tetzlaff carries an unusually broad repertoire of standard cello works as well as compositions composed in the 20th and 21st century and is particularly active organizing and participating in ground-breaking concert productions which include other art forms and often focus on current events, like climate change. She plays a violoncello by Giovanni Battista Guadagnini from 1776. Her website is en.tanjatetzlaff.com.
Kiveli Dörken, piano
An active performer with orchestras and in recital in Germany, Kiveli Dörken dedicates a considerable amount of her time to playing chamber music and performs regularly with artists such as Christian Tetzlaff, Maximilian Hornung, and Tanja Tetzlaff. She studied with Lars Vogt at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hanover and is also the Artistic Director of the Molyvos International Music Festival (MIMF) on the Greek Island Lesbos, a festival she founded in 2015. Her website is kiveli-doerken.com.
“Few could have brought such authority or expressive force to this music” – SF Gate
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 1, No. 3
View NotesBeethoven cut his musical teeth in his native Bonn, a relatively small provincial capital whose cultural life offered limited scope for a prodigiously gifted and ambitious young musician. In late 1792 he burst onto the scene in cosmopolitan Vienna and spent the rest of the decade burnishing his reputation as a pianistic powerhouse; upon hearing him play, his fellow virtuoso Wenzel Tomaschek was so overwhelmed that he refused to touch his own instrument for days. Despite their numerical designation, the three piano trios that constitute Beethoven’s Opus 1 were not the first pieces of music he wrote; they weren’t even his first pieces of chamber music. They were, however, the works that Beethoven chose to introduce himself to the discriminating Viennese public. The popularity of the piano trio genre, which Mozart and Haydn had brought to a high plane of sophistication, ensured that the publication of the three works in 1795 would attract considerable attention, to say nothing of earning a tidy sum for their chronically impecunious composer.
Beethoven was impatient to take his place in the public eye alongside Haydn, with whom he studied from late 1792 to early 1794. The C-minor Trio was considerably more adventurous than its two companions in the Op. 1 set—so adventurous, in fact, that Haydn advised his pupil not to publish it for fear of alienating potential patrons and customers. Beethoven interpreted this well-intended tip as symptom of jealousy, a claim that seems far-fetched in light of Haydn’s magnanimous disposition. (In fact, the older composer would later eat his words, telling Beethoven’s student Ferdinand Ries that “he had not imagined that this trio would be so quickly and easily understood nor so favorably received by the public.”) Not only did Beethoven disregard Haydn’s advice, he petulantly refused to include the customary acknowledgment of his teacher on the title page of his debut opus. Instead, he opted to curry favor with the aristocracy by dedicating the three trios to a future patron, Prince Karl Lichnowsky.
Beethoven’s debt to the older master is apparent in the C-minor Trio’s combination of Sturm und Drang turbulence and a quirky, playful spirit that at times borders on impishness. The opening Allegro con brio sets the tone for the work in its explosive energy and air of brooding menace. If the writing for violin and cello falls well within the competency of accomplished amateurs, the piano part presents technical demands of a higher order, reminding us that Beethoven in his mid-twenties had already established himself as one of Europe’s leading virtuosos. The bravura element is still more pronounced in the spitfire variations of the Andante cantabile and the tense, intricately interlocking gestures of the Menuetto. In the latter, Beethoven seems to go out of his way to subvert the genre’s nominal character: this minuet is more calisthenics than dance. All the Trio’s pent-up energy is released in the feverish Finale, which germinates from a stabbing three-note motif that is as arresting, and as packed with musical meaning, as the “fate” motive in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
© Harry Haskell, 2022
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Piano Trio No 2 in G minor, Op. 26
View NotesA comparatively late bloomer, Dvořák was in his early 30s when he first made his mark in his native Bohemia. Until then his reputation had barely penetrated beyond the city limits of Prague, where he eked out a modest living as a piano teacher and church organist. A few of his songs and chamber works had been performed locally, and his comic opera King and Charcoal Burner had been well received at the city’s Czech-language opera house. But Dvořák’s career didn’t really take off until the imperial Austrian government awarded him a much-needed stipend in 1875. In addition to providing a measure of financial security for the composer and his growing family, the prestigious prize brought him to the attention of Brahms, who proceeded to write a glowing recommendation to his own publisher in Berlin. Dvořák “has written all manner of things: operas (Czech), symphonies, quartets, piano pieces,” Brahms told Fritz Simrock in 1877. “In any case, he is a very talented man.” Soon the obscure Czech composer was inundated with so many requests for compositions that he had trouble keeping up with them.
Among the works Dvořák produced in this first flush of celebrity was the second of his four extant piano trios. Completed in January 1876, the Trio in G minor is less well known than the F-minor Trio of 1883 or the ever-popular “Dumky” Trio of 1891. But the fact that it followed Dvořák’s debut in the genre by less than a year (not counting a pair of earlier trios that he apparently destroyed) suggests he found the combination of piano, violin, and cello a congenial medium for expressing his growing interest in Czech folk music, as evidenced in works like the song cycle Moravian Duets. The Trio’s elegiac G-minor tonality, and the bittersweet lyricism of the slow movement in particular, have led some listeners to associate it with the death of the Dvořáks’ newborn daughter in August 1875. (Twenty years earlier, the composer’s senior compatriot Bedřich Smetana had written a piano trio in the same key in an explicit response to his four-year-old daughter’s death of scarlet fever.) Yet the overall impression the music makes is anything but funereal.
The Allegro moderato opens with a pair of boldly annunciatory chords, followed by a languid melody that trails off in a faster rippling figure. These three contrasting ideas are the basic building blocks of a movement that displays Dvořák’s gift for folk-like lyricism, subtle rhythmic modulations, and sophisticated thematic development. The E-flat-major Largo is similarly economical, elaborating as it does on a simple arching motif in a distinctly Schubertian mode. (Dvořák especially admired Schubert’s two piano trios, calling them “among the very best of their kind in all musical literature.”) The manic intensity of the Scherzo, a vigorous triple-time dance in G minor, is tempered by the graceful lilt of the movement’s major-key Trio section, while the bravura Finale evinces a sturdy Schumannesque spirit, including a brief passage of fugal writing.
© Harry Haskell, 2022
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Piano Trio in B-flat major, D. 898
View NotesSchubert’s genius as a composer of art songs manifested itself while he was still in his teens. But in other genres—notably the symphony and chamber music—he struggled to cast off the weight of tradition (as represented above all by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) and embrace the new freedom of the Romantic style. Schubert’s two mature piano trios are a case in point. His first essay in the medium, a short and rather commonplace student piece written in 1812, was all but unknown until the manuscript came to light in the 1920s. Why the composer lost interest in writing for the popular (and highly marketable) combination of piano, violin, and cello is a mystery. At any rate, it was only in the last year of his life that Schubert produced the two great piano trios that cemented his reputation as Beethoven’s peer in the realm of chamber music: the Trio in B-flat major, D. 898, and the Trio in E-flat major, D. 929.
Little is known about the genesis of the B-flat-major Trio, which in Schubert’s lifetime was eclipsed by its sequel. The score wasn’t published until eight years after the composer’s death, and scholars long believed that neither Schubert nor his contemporaries actually heard it performed. Research by Eva Badura-Skoda and others, however, suggests that D. 898 was premiered on December 26, 1827, in the music hall of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Music Lovers’ Society) in Vienna, the same venue where the E-flat-major Trio would receive its first airing three months later. Both works appear to have been written for the Czech pianist Karl Maria von Bocklet, whose virtuosity far outshone Schubert’s modest keyboard technique. He was joined by the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh and the cellist Josef Linke in what Schubert described as an “admirably executed” performance.
Robert Schumann’s comparison of Schubert’s twin masterpieces is typically insightful: “The first movement, which in the [E-flat-major Trio] is inspired by deep indignation as well as boundless longing, is graceful and virginal in the one before us [the B-flat-major Trio]. The adagio, there a sigh tending to swell to anxiety, is here a happy dream, a rising and falling of genuine feeling…. In a word, the Trio in E-flat major is more spirited, masculine, and dramatic; this one is more passive, lyric, and feminine.” From our perspective, the two trios do in fact have much in common, starting with the marked similarity between the exuberantly annunciatory openings of their first movements. There is in both works the same restless toggling between light and shadow, lyricism and drama, impetuosity and repose. The slow movement of the B-flat-major Trio, with its impassioned middle section driven by agitated syncopations, has a bittersweet radiance that even Schubert seldom surpassed. The Trio section of the Scherzo is delicate, almost submissive, while the rollicking, rondo-form finale is characterized by propulsive dotted rhythms, sharp dynamic contrasts, and ethereal fluttering effects.
© Harry Haskell, 2022