音乐视频：贝多芬的《三重协奏曲》

贝多芬的《三重协奏曲》
Beethhoven's Triple Concerto for Piano, Violin, and Cello in C, Op. 56 

 还是在大学毕业一年多后的1988年秋季的某一天的夜里8点多钟，我独自一人乘公共机车到袁建国先生在其结婚后在江汉区离长江边不太远的一所单间老房子成就的婚房新家。这里离他原在六合里的老单间房不远。
    那天晚上我们照样聊起了音乐。我问他最近都听些什么。他告诉我说正在听贝多芬的《三重协奏曲》和《D大调庄严弥撒》。我说，哇，这些作品恐怕还不适合我听吧。我那时刚入门没几年，主要听一些古典和浪漫派音乐中比较“通俗易懂”的作品。这两个作品应该不是像我这样没有音乐教育背景的入门者所能接受和欣赏得了的。不过，他的一席话深深地烙印在了我的脑海里，我发誓等到我有了对西方经典音乐更好的感受能力后一去要听它们。
    介绍贝多芬的《英雄的15个主题变奏和赋格曲》的博文《音乐欣赏：原汁原味的英雄 》里，我曾提到大约是在1993年秋季的一天，我去武汉的老展览馆看音像制品销售展。正是在那天，我在大量的音像制品中发现了一张PILZ公司出品的CD，编号是DDD 160 179，CD名为Vienna Master Series, Digital-Classic，其中包含两部贝多芬的作品。第一部就是由莫斯科人三重奏团（Moskauer Trio/Violin, Cello and Piano）与斯洛文尼亚的卢布尔雅那交响管弦乐队（Rundunk-Sinfonic-Orchester Ljubljana / Conductor: Lutz Herbig）合作的贝多芬的《三重协奏曲》。那个版本成了我日后反复聆听的唯一版本，所以，非常的喜爱。尽管乐队的音质有时有点儿粗糙，乐队的气势也不够宏大（其实这部作品原本并不需要气势宏大的乐队），但久听成瘾，已经完全不介意是否有更好的版本了。我坚信，一个音乐作品是否好坏与演奏者没有多大的关系，而是由作品本身决定的。因此，一个录音版本只要是由一个熟练的专业演奏者演奏的，我都会认真接受和欣赏。
    聆听这部作品可能不需要激情般的体验，你需要的是冷静的沉思，由此你有可能会从中发现某种崇高的因素（尤其是在第二乐章中，这种情愫非常的强烈）、深刻的哲理以及多重概念之间的复杂的逻辑联想。

 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 

卡拉扬早期版：20世纪四巨头的世纪联决版：

第二乐章

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

第三乐章

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

卡拉扬后期完整版：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

[周游世界]

完全同意你的评价，卡拉扬指挥的俄国三位杰出音乐家演出的贝氏三重奏也一直是我的最爱。谢谢推荐！

[megchen]

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

I happened to have 卡拉扬早期版. 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 卡拉扬后期完整版 is also very good.