Music TORONTO presents Tetzlaff/Tetzlaff/Doerken Trio. Mozart’s Piano Trio in E, K. 542; Smetana’s Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 15; Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50. Jane Mallett Theatre. 27 Front Street East. October 21, 2025.
The Trio
Until recently, the Tetzlaff/Tetzlaff/Doerken Trio was the Tetzlaff/Tetzlaff/Vogt Trio. Sadly, pianist Lars Vogt passed away from cancer in 2022, and the Tetzlaff siblings — violinist Christian and cellist Tanja — recruited one of Vogt’s students, Kiveli Doerken, to take his place. That she has done superbly since 2024.
Grief As The Theme
Suitably, grief guides the program of piano trios selected for this performance at the Jane Mallett Theatre. Well, most of it anyway. Smetana wrote his Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 15 (1855, rev. 1857, 1880) to commemorate the death of his daughter Bedriska at four years old, while the death of pianist Nikolai Rubinstein inspired Tchaikovsky to compose his Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50 (1881-2), premiered on the first anniversary of his death and dedicated to him.
The Concert
Oddly, the program began with Mozart’s Piano Trio in E, K. 542 (1788), a piece that doesn’t deal with the sombre emotions explored in the rest of the program. The evening’s concert notes make a valiant case for the composition’s subtle ambiguity and deceptive rigour underlying its themes and structure, and the Tetzlaff/Tetzlaff/Doerken Trio’s playing is faultless if generally restrained.
However, the piece is lacking in the depth or compositional interest of the rest of the program. It’s charming at best but seems quite out of place in leading off a program that is otherwise dark and brooding.
The evening began to come alive in the Smetana trio. Its chromatically descending minor key opening is rendered with all due dramatic intensity, complete with foot stomps from ponytailed violinist Christian Tetzlaff, who generally commands centre stage throughout the performance.
It’s a feverish piece that, in all three movements, harnesses the expressive language of Slavic folk music to the classical form. Its major key resolution is perhaps slightly unconvincing, but its preceding turmoil is powerful.
A Brilliant Conclusion
The evening finished with Tchaikovsky’s trio, a piece he apparently wrote only reluctantly. A long two-movement work supposedly modelled on Beethoven’s last piano sonata, it shares with the Smetana a melancholy atmosphere clearly drawn from Slavic folk music — it particularly loves to milk minor 9ths to this end in its first movement — and it is in this first movement that the trio’s passion is most in evidence, as feet stomp and bows go flying leaving horsehairs waving there.
The second movement has a fascinatingly asymmetric theme redolent of a Bach fugue, with a two-bar melodic statement that shifts emphasis from the first to the second beat in the second bar. Some performances opt for a smooth rendition of this theme, in deference to classical balance; Tetzlaff/Tetzlaff/Doerken go the other way, with pianist Doerken setting the stage at the outset with a strong attack on the asymmetric concluding note of the theme.
It’s a choice that pays off in keeping the audience ever so slightly off balance throughout the theme and variations of the long movement, which winds its way through a range of lighter forms before concluding back with the original theme from the first movement, a memento mori to conclude the evening.
The Trio — Final Thoughts
The Tetzlaffs have made a brilliant choice in inviting Kiveli Doerken to join them. The trio play with style and fervour. Though they haven’t played together for much time, they engage in the kind of subtle communication that makes chamber music special when done right. Lars Vogt is genuinely missed for many musical and personal reasons, but his replacement is certainly keeping his legacy alive.
One can look forward to more performances by the Tetzlaff/Tetzlaff/Doerken Trio in the future.
By Marc Glassman for Ludwig-Van.
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