Uploaded September 2010 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
Composed for, and premiered by, the Oromonte Trio at the ICA in 1964, the String Trio is something of an extreme even in Lutyens' output in its demands on performer and listener alike -- just as Webern's String Trio, Op. 20 marked an extreme in his. Lutyens associated the Webern with her first encounters with Edward Clark, and evidently strove for a comparably self-transcendent achievement. The first of her five movements is already a complex mosaic of compressed gestures and glancing nuances. The second distills a mood of restless stasis in just 12 pianissimo bars. The fat third is a test of ensemble playing as the three instruments alternately phrase together then fly apart, while the curiously sauntering, intermezzo-like fourth is a test of continuity. Then, ast he fifth movement announces itself in a jagged recitative, one begins to sense another model behind Webern. Along with Debusy and Webern Lutyens named Beethoven as her third favorite composer. After a few bars hesitation, her finale launches itself in a fierce dialectic of jagged figures mitigated only by a sparser trio section at its centre, and marked at the dizzying tempo of semiquaver -- 200. As a sometime string player herself, Lutyens must have intended a sense of struggling for the impossible. Where have we heard this kind of struggle before? Lutyens finale is not a little like a Webernian miniaturization of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge.
Composed for, and premiered by, the Oromonte Trio at the ICA in 1964, the String Trio is something of an extreme even in Lutyens' output in its demands on performer and listener alike -- just as Webern's String Trio, Op. 20 marked an extreme in his. Lutyens associated the Webern with her first encounters with Edward Clark, and evidently strove for a comparably self-transcendent achievement. The first of her five movements is already a complex mosaic of compressed gestures and glancing nuances. The second distills a mood of restless stasis in just 12 pianissimo bars. The fat third is a test of ensemble playing as the three instruments alternately phrase together then fly apart, while the curiously sauntering, intermezzo-like fourth is a test of continuity. Then, ast he fifth movement announces itself in a jagged recitative, one begins to sense another model behind Webern. Along with Debusy and Webern Lutyens named Beethoven as her third favorite composer. After a few bars hesitation, her finale launches itself in a fierce dialectic of jagged figures mitigated only by a sparser trio section at its centre, and marked at the dizzying tempo of semiquaver -- 200. As a sometime string player herself, Lutyens must have intended a sense of struggling for the impossible. Where have we heard this kind of struggle before? Lutyens finale is not a little like a Webernian miniaturization of Beethoven's Grosse Fuge.
