Salon français
This recording features yet another magnificent musical trove and rediscovery by the Trio Parnassus: the French late-romanticist Benjamin Godard. This composer’s trios were extremely popular and in high demand in European salons at the beginning of the twentieth century. A hundred years ago the English chamber music authority Walter Wilson Cobbett even ennobled his works as “enchanting and recommendable without hesitation.“ Académie Française Little has been written about Benjamin Godard even in the relevant secondary literature. He was from a
well-to-do Parisian family and gained fame as a child prodigy. He began instruction in violin at an early age
and in 1865, at the age of sixteen, wrote his first sonata for violin and piano. Godard belonged to the Jeune Académie Française, whose members wanted to include a French tone in their works. Godard made a name for himself throughout Europe as an outstanding symphonist and opera composer. The highest honors were bestowed on him when he was appointed to the post of professor at the Paris Conservatory in 1887. He certainly would have played a larger role in music history if he had not died at the early age of forty-five. À la mode française Godard’s piano trios from 1880 and 1884 were intended for performance in the middle-class salons and enjoyed great popularity above all in such settings. In these compositions lyrical passages alternate with ideas of high drama. The virtuosity and musical intelligence of the instrumentalists are of course challenged to the utmost. As a pretty encore, this recording also contains the berceuse from the opera Jocelyn – such a refined idea that even today it continues to be heard repeatedly as part of the permanent repertoire and in countless arrangements.
Au goût français With their more than thirty recordings on MDG the cellist Michael Groß and his two chamber partners – currently the violinist Yamei Yu and the pianist Chia Chou – have shown that the allusion to Mount
Parnassus in the name of their trio rightly situates them in the vicinity of the Delphic Oracle. Their prophetic intuition has repeatedly pointed to major successes in their presentation of unknown composers or forgotten music in excellent quality and – as in this case – with the finest sophistication.