Slawische Kontraste

Shostakovich wrote his Second Piano Trio in 1944 in memory of a friend, and gave its finale a dance theme in a Jewish idiom at the moment the first reports of the camps were reaching him — the same tune carries the laughter and the horror, which is the point of it. Dvořák's Dumky Trio is built from six dumky, and a dumka is precisely a piece that turns from lament to dance and back, often inside a single phrase. Musicians of the Staatskapelle, in the foyer at eleven.