Born in 1903 in Tbilisi, now the capital of Georgia, Soviet composer Aram Khachaturian drew on the folklore and the music of his region, which took its flavors from the east of the USSR, rather than from Western Europe. Although eastern influence amounted to mere Orientalism when exploited by composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, for Khachaturian it was his heritage and, musically speaking, his mother tongue. And unlike his Russian predecessors who manufactured authenticity for the sake of popular appeal, Khachaturian’s language drew from genuine Caucasian, Uzbek and Armenian folk music. Although his 1932 Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano was an early student work, written while the composer was enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory, it showcases the distinctive characteristics that would eventually become hallmarks of the composer’s style.

Chamber music accounts for only a small part of Khachaturian’s compositional output; ballet music (including the famous “Sabre Dance” from Gayane) and symphonic music assumed primary importance. After 1936, when Russian politics had turned squarely against the “decay” of modern music in the west, chamber music in particular came under suspicion for perpetuating Western decadence, and Khachaturian ceased producing small-scale works. The Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano was, in fact, his last chamber work; a year later Maxim Gorky published the doctrine of “socialist realism” that mandated an idealized depiction of Soviet life in the performing arts.

The musical idiom of the Trio leaves no room for misinterpretation. Its three movements are a sequence of modal folk themes with an unambiguous Eastern flavor, supplying a richness of character in compensation for what they lack, by design, in the motivic development of more “learned” forms. The piano opens the first movement, an Andante con dolore (“painful Andante”) with a stark sequence of chords, above which the clarinet introduces the main theme: a folk-like tune in Dorian mode, ornamented with violin filigree. The improvisatory element of the theme expands as the movement progresses, climaxing in a clarinet cadenza while the violin adds color with tremolo and muted passages.

The middle movement, a scherzo, is an arch form. An abbreviated prelude with violin pizzicato is followed by a chromatic waltz in the clarinet. After building to an agitato peak, the waltz returns before the prelude is taken up again. To listeners of the 21st century, the klezmer flavor of the clarinet theme is unmistakable.

The finale introduces another clarinet solo, this time unaccompanied. Initially improvisatory, it gains rhythmic stability once the piano enters. The voicing of its subsequent themes in parallel fifths and octaves adds richer folk flavor, and the concluding presto embeds the previous themes in a round dance before settling down to a quiet close.

—Dr. Scot Buzza