Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano

1980

18 minutes

Mirecourt Trio

April 4, 1981, Oak Park Illinois, Mirecourt Trio (Kenneth Goldsmith, violin, Terry King, cello, and John Jensen, piano)

Gunmar Music, Inc.

1. Fluente
   L’istesso tempo, ma pesanta e marcato
   Passacaglia (Lento, in memory of Gregor Piatigorsky)
    
2. Allegretto
   Allegro
   Elegy on a theme by Ravel

During the fall of 1980 Fine completed another commission, Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano (1980) for the Mirecourt Trio. She wrote a large, complex, and demanding piece of two movements that are divided into sections. The movements are about equal in length, making the design symmetrical, and having a formal plan of ABC AB’D. Movement one’s A section begins with a sixteenth-note canon between the violin and cello lasting nine measures. When composing the original line, Fine was careful not to repeat patterns, and a few places where she did are disguised with changes in phrasing. Similar to the opening of Teisho, the pitches from this original background texture are reused throughout the Trio. The B section presents “pesante e marcato” lines set in textures that repeat and recombine, while C is a passacaglia in memory of Gregor Piatigorsky, who died in 1976. The eight-measure passacaglia theme is repeated eight times in a series of growing complexities….The second movement’s A section begins with a piano texture derived from the Trio’s opening canon and uses similar material as the initial A, enhanced with rescoring, added counterpoints, and canons….[the final section] is an elegy on a theme by Ravel paralleling the earlier passacaglia.

–Heidi Von Gunden, The Music of Vivian Fine, Scarecrow Press, 1999

first movement

second movement