“Endings” — Piano Trios by Shostakovich and Schubert

We welcome Close Encounters With Music back to Saint James Place on Sunday, February 15, 2025 at 4pm.

How to end and exit a musical composition—with a bang or a whimper? Will there be the thunderous affirmation of a Beethoven symphony or a whispered adieu à la Mahler’s Song of the Earth, sailing into eternity? A cliffhanger ending leaves the audience on the edge of their seats while a full-circle ending bringing us back to the beginning satisfies human desire for resolution and completeness. Ambiguous endings can evoke many different emotional responses while the happy ending is a classic, satisfying viewers and listeners as they wrap up their experience. Compositional choices will be illuminated by Shostakovich’s haunting, riveting Trio No. 2 and Schubert’s heavenly last work, the Trio No. 2 in E-flat major (the main theme of the slow movement was borrowed from a Swedish song, “The sun has set”), as he turns death and personal tragedy into a triumph—his own personal ending of choice.

Gila Goldstein, piano; Xiao-Dong Wang, violin; Yehuda Hanani, cello