Piano Trio Two (2004)

Anyone who has heard one of her operas will remember how the simplest melodic shape can take on huge expressive responsibility, and in Piano Trio Two, the ghosts of different folk musics flit through textures that are illuminated from all kinds of unexpected angles, revealing landscapes that are compellingly strange.

…its three tightly compressed movements suggested by Zen stories and abruptly juxtaposed sharply contrasted gestures and textures drawn from a variety of world musics. As often in Weir, the continuity behind the brightly faceted surface is quite challenging to follow. But that is why she always repays repeated listening.

'How Grass and Tress Become Enlightened' gleefully decorates a song of the composer's own with her familiar, subtly shifting metric patterns, rhythmic unisons and glacial harmonies... 'Your light may go out' has a pungently lyrical string melody inflected with quartertones…The final movement, 'Open Your Own Treasure House', steers vivaciously close to a number of different musical styles, including that of Janacek. Yet, as almost always with Weir, she manages to make everything sound uncannily her own. The final crash of the closing piano keyboard lid announces another abrupt movement ending to this most engaging addition to the piano trio repetoire.

'Judith Weir's Piano Trio Two conceals, beneath its austere, generic title, music of real mystery and richness. The Florestan Trio…revelled in Weir's quirky fantasy and mercurial imagination…The opening movement, How Grass and Trees Become Enlightened, was a game of musical contrasts, as the juxtaposition between the a forceful major chord and languid piano line at the start of the piece propelled the music on a vivid, unpredictable journey.'

'From the first notes of Judith Weir's specially commissioned Piano Trio Two…one knew that a finely poised discourse would ensue, and so it did. Three lean, plian movements, each with a little from a zen anecdote and cast in Weir's idiom of transparency and transfigured folkishness, ranged discretely across the possibilities of the medium. Most striking was the middle movement, Your Light May Go Out, in which a tenebrous (quarter-tonal) string duo and an incandescent piano part are united halfway through. The symmetrical overall structure moves with witty concision to its appointed end, a slam of the keyboard lid.'