SKU: PR.11441825S

UPC: 680160643745. 9 x 12 inches.

In 2011, Barbara Garrop, my mother, commissioned me to write a piano trio in memory of Norman Garrop, my father, who passed away about thirty years ago. When I started brainstorming about topics for the piece, I found it difficult to recall many moments of my early life involving my father. Too many years had passed, and the memories that I could summon were of achild looking up to her father, not an adult relating to an equal. However, while collecting stories of my father from various family members, along with discovering a number of objects that had once belonged to him and that I had stored away in boxes decades ago, I began to realize that this piece wasn't so much about my father as it was about my re-discovering the man that he was: a loving husband and dad who cared deeply about his family and his passions (which included bike riding, collecting coins, strumming our guitar, playing baseball, watching football games, entertaining people, helping to run local theater and puppet productions, and carving objects out of wook); an accountant who dreamed of a better future: a treasurer of our local synagogue; an early advocate for computers (we owned an Apple II+); and a pranster with a great sense of humor. Ultimately, I decided to musically tell the story of my search for these memories. In the first movement (Without), a child calls out in a sing-song voice, searching for her lost parent. This search intesifies over the course of the movement through a series of themes, including a stepping motif in which a two-note progression steadily climbs higher, a pseudo-jewish folksong, and a passionate longing theme. The child's search becomes increasingly intense throughout the movement, calling out fervently and repeatedly to the parent; the movement ends in a moment of great tnesion and uncertainty. The second movment (Within) quietly opens with the lost parent finally answering, represented by a solo cello; the child (now personified by the violin) has found the parent within the sanctuary of her own heart. This movement highlights the joy and solemnity of this beautiful discovery. -S.G.

SKU: BO.B.3713

Without doubt, the most important chamber music work by Malats, and one of his finest compositions, is his Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano in B Flat Major. It was composed in 1898.

Malats dedicated the Trio to one of the greatest composers of all time, Camille Saint-Saëns, close personal friend of both Malats and Granados. An unknown gem of the chamber music repertoire, this Modernist work is superior in form, technique and musical content to similar work by Granados, Breton, Chapi and others.

Malats had considerable knowledge and experience with the trio form. In 1894 at the Sala erard in Paris he performed four trios by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Godard and Saint-Saëns with C. Flesch and Hasselmann. Given his experiences with chamber music it is not surprising that Malats exhibited such confidence and security in writing his Trio maintaining perfect balance and dialogue between the three instruments which he achieved through masterful control of the formal structure. This work has a rich harmonic language and none of the Nationalist qualities of his previous pieces. Instead, it reveals Malats proximity to then current European music yet, at the same time, exhibits his personal style and musical knowledge.