Piano Trio No. 4 in E Minor

Dumky Trio—by any standards, it’s a quirky name for a classical piano trio. Dvořák himself apparently once cornered a folklore expert in a Prague café with the question, “What’s a dumka?” There are many answers, but in essence a dumka (dumky is the plural) is a kind of dance ballad, originally from Ukraine but familiar throughout Slavic Europe. As Dvořák understood it, a dumka alternated slow, melancholy song with exuberant, fast-moving dance. (Then, more often than not, flipped them back on each other.) In the spring of 1891, he used it as a template for one of the most characterful works ever written for violin, cello and piano. The Dumky Trio is a collection of six dumkas, with all their bold contrasts of colour, energy and emotion. There's tragic drama and sparkling gaiety in the opening dance. The more subdued second dumka remains melancholy even when the tempo increases; the third is a serene idyll, with a single dark cloud in its second “Vivace”. The fourth has a balletic poise, and the fifth, after its opening flourish, accelerates into a brilliant whirl. And the Trio finishes with a dumka that moves from a searching introduction to a headlong race for the finish: a hit with its first audiences in Prague, and one of Dvořák’s most original and enduringly popular chamber works.