Brahms, Shostakovich and John Zorn: the Junction Trio debuts at the 92nd St Y

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Nearly a decade ago, violinist Stefan Jackiw, cellist Jay Campbell and pianist Conrad Tao decided to form the Junction Trio. Each has appeared separately at the 92nd Street Y Center for Culture & Arts in Manhattan, but on 1 November the supergroup makes its anticipated debut there with a programme combining two of the greatest works of the piano trio literature – the Brahms B major and Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No.2 – with the world premiere of John Zorn’s Philosophical Investigations II.

In their solo careers, all three are highly distinguished, sought-after musicians, yet they carve out time each season to tour with two or three programmes as the Junction Trio. The 92nd St Y appearance, though, is a special one-off event that is not part of a tour. How do they find time amid their crammed schedules to perform (let alone rehearse) together? ’A lot of things about this lifestyle are challenging, but you have to make time for the ones that are important’, responds Campbell. ’My approach is to treat it like it’s a relationship’. 

Just ahead of their fall concert, Jackiw and Campbell met by Zoom to talk about their collaboration with John Zorn, the connections between his new piece and the Brahms Trio in B major and what performing in a trio of musical friends means for them.

What initially brought you together to start performing as a trio in 2015?

Stefan Jackiw: I played with Jay on a chamber music tour of South Korea where we did the Schubert Cello Quintet. I had never heard the cello played so beautifully before in my life. Chamber music was, up to that point, just something I did at summer festivals with ad hoc groups. I began thinking that maybe a piano trio can survive as a part-time group. With string quartets, that’s hard to do. So at the end of the tour, I said: let’s find a pianist make a trio out of it.  Neither of us had met Conrad Tao at that point, but we left him a Facebook message and later met up at his apartment and through Mendelssohn and Mozart trios.

Jay, from your perspective playing with the JACK Quartet, what is it like to switch gears to play in a piano trio?

Jay Campbell:  It’s a different way of working that’s really refreshing. String quartets tend to gravitate towards this hyper hive-mind approach, often merging into a singularity. What’s really distinctive about the piano trio is that the nature and esthetic of the ensemble itself are very individualistic. So it’s really like a different instrument – a different way of approaching playing and interacting with other people. The inherent differences between two string players and a nine-foot piano are also interesting to navigate.

What’s really distinctive about the piano trio is that the nature and esthetic of the ensemble itself are very individualistic

This programme promises an intriguing dialogue between something brand new and familiar repertoire. How did you arrive at that balance?

Jay Campbell: We had been talking for a while about playing the First Trio of Brahms. It’s such a centrepiece of the repertoire yet we hadn’t had a chance to do it yet. So it happened that a previous commission we did by John Zorn [Philosophical Investigations I] ends on this beautiful B major chord. When we were rehearsing it with Zorn, Conrad or Stefan went straight into the Brahms Trio as a joke. Zorn thought that was hilarious and started maniacally cracking up, as he often does. And then Philosophical Investigations II showed up in our inboxes, containing lots of quotes from the Brahms.

Stefan Jackiw: The Brahms is so rich and generous and also sprawling in its way, and the Zorn is incredibly dense, though it’s not very long. We felt that maybe a slightly more compact first half might balance that meaty second half. The Brahms and the Shostakovich Second Piano Trio could not be more different sonically and emotionally. The Brahms is so lush and warm, while the Shostakovich is chilly and sparse – and terrifying. I guess the Zorn piece has both those elements. So we realised it could be a bridge between the Shostakovich and the Brahms.

Jay, you have a long-lasting connection with John Zorn: he’s written more than a dozen works for you, and the first Philosophical Investigations was included on another significant Junction Trio concert, at your Carnegie Hall debut this past spring. What do you enjoy most about collaborating with him?

Jay Campbell: John doesn’t take financial compensation for his pieces, which is a really interesting model. When we commission pieces for the JACK Quartet, often it doesn’t get written until three or four years later, because there’s a whole process of finding the money and finding a presenter who wants to do it. Sometimes it feels like whatever spark of inspiration there was at the moment of commissioning a piece is already gone. With John Zorn, you can bring up an idea, and then a week later, a piece lands in your inbox – it’s so immediate. 

And John always thinks about writing for people, not instruments, and takes into consideration the personality of the players. He has written a lot of pieces for me or for ensembles that I’m in, so he knows my playing well and knows where to challenge me. Every single piece of his has new challenges that push my playing – often in directions that I didn’t think were possible. It almost feels like he knows my playing better than I do. It’s really fun to grow into a piece, especially when it’s written for you. 

What’s an example in the new piece of pushing you in an unexpected direction?

Jay Campbell: He goes very far in the direction of single-voice counterpoint, where it sounds like I’m playing 12 different instruments at the same time. My cello part looks like a piano part where there are two lines that are extremely jumpy.

Stefan, what’s your take on the new piece?

Stefan Jackiw: Zorn’s music has a reputation for being very dense and thorny, but it’s actually highly lyrical. There are moments of almost Italian, bel canto textures. They get juxtaposed with incredibly kinetic, thorny stuff, where there’s a bajillion thing things happening at once. Suddenly there will be a clearing and then a soaring melody with a clear, accompanimental line. 

There are some moments where I have not yet figured out whether they’re actually playable at the tempo he indicates. But that sort of near-impossibility is part of the aesthetic. There’s a kind of manic scramble that is such a signature Zorn texture. It’s incredibly exciting to listen to onstage, to see and hear the instrumentalists pushed to their absolute limits there. We haven’t yet put it together. It’s going to sound crazy and exciting and harrowing, amid all these warm, lush Brahms quotations.

Do you think it might even lead to another broken-bow incident? 

Stefan Jackiw: [laughing] And I wasn’t even playing a crazy aggressive piece! That was [the UK premiere of] Reinhold Glière’s Violin Concerto, and my bow snapped in half.  I guess that’s why no one plays that piece. 

Incidentally, what was the diagnosis? Is your 19th-century Parisian bow back to full health? 

Stefan Jackiw: Yes. As soon as I walked offstage, I took a photo of it and sent it to my bow guy in New York and and asked: is this fixable? And he texted back: in four days. Though with a huge dip in value.

Back to Zorn: he refers to the 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein by titling the piece Philosophical Investigations. What does that connection to Wittgenstein and his language games mean for you musically?

Jay Campbell:  I think one of the trademarks of Zorn’s music is that it’s speaking multiple languages all the time. I just played at a 40th-anniversary concert of Zorn’s Cobra at Roulette, which is a ’game piece’ for genres for improvising musicians and a flexible ensemble. Zorn really enjoys this kind of multi-stylistic chaos. It’s like a kind of channel surfing.

How about the Brahms B major Trio, which you’re finally performing together for the first time. What’s so special for you about this piece?

Jay Campbell: An alluring part of the Brahms trios overall for me is that they have parts I find mysterious and don’t really understand, and that makes me want to dig into them. For example, the opening of the B major Trio suggests that the whole piece will be easy and obvious, and then it goes in such challenging other directions. I can’t make heads or tails of how it culminates in the last movement.

Stefan Jackiw: That’s interesting that you say the opening suggests that the entire piece is going to have this sort of easy sunniness to it. That reminds me of the way the First Violin Sonata starts, which is the easiest melody to love – and then the piece veers off into this heartbreaking nostalgia. And the last movement is like an enigma that is very hard to grasp. But it’s one of my desert-island masterpieces. I feel sort of the same way about the B major Trio. The opening is so undeniable and then goes into this weird counterpoint. The last movement is also satisfying but sometimes is not what you expect from such a lush opening in the first movement. So hopefully we’ll be able to solve that!

What are some future projects you’d like to do as the Junction Trio?

Stefan Jackiw: A dream of mine is to have a triple concerto written for us. Another thing that we do now and then as a trio is to play the Beethoven Triple Concerto with orchestras. We’re doing that again next season. 

Jay Campbell: I would love to rehabilitate the reputation of the Triple Concerto. People will say it’s a bad piece, but I don’t buy that at all. Maybe it’s not the Fifth Symphony, but it is a really great piece. It’s so triumphant and fun and it traverses a huge range.

In the longer-term picture, I’d love to experiment with playing with fortepiano and different kind of historical instruments to see what that does to interpretations. I had a great experience playing some of the Beethoven cello sonatas with fortepiano. It feels like you’re playing a different piece in a way. I would learn a lot about the pieces that I’m playing by changing the instruments that we play them on. 

The Junction Trio will perform at the 92nd St Y on 1 November 2024.