The piano trio literature is perhaps richer than it might otherwise appear at first mental blush, and there are some great works in this genre that are too little-known to general audiences.
That can surely be said of the Piano Trio (in G minor, Op. 15) composed in 1855 by Bedrich Smetana, founder of the Czech national school of composition. It can just as confidently be said that there were a substantial number of people on hand at the Rinker Playhouse on Tuesday night who had never heard it, but enjoyed the introduction to it they received from Germany’s Morgenstern Trio.
The members of the Morgenstern, who were making their Florida debut, proved to be an able and skillful threesome who handled a varied program on a very high level of music-making, and whose encore – the second movement of the Ravel Piano Trio – offered a tantalizing glimpse of still another style that it would have been marvelous to hear more of.
The trio – violinist Stefan Hempel, cellist Emanuel Wehse and pianist Catherine Klipfel – devoted the first half of their concert to two works from the first half of the 20th century by composers who were still In their teens when they composed them. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 1 (in C, Op. 8) has been making steady inroads into the repertoire, and looks likely to join its much later brother, the Trio No. 2 (in E minor, Op. 67), in the canon. It’s a moody, somewhat stylistically manic piece that nevertheless is beautifully written by a 16-year-old boy who knows how to grab an audience.
Things were slightly shaky intonation-wise in the first moments of the Shostakovich on Tuesday night, but Wehse managed to get things straightened out with his slowly descending primary theme, demonstrating a lovely, intimate tone as he did so. Klipfel proved to be a rock-solid player with excellent technique and thorough musicality, and while Hempel played somewhat tentatively at first, his performance grew in confidence as the work continued. The upshot was a sensitive, expertly realized reading that clearly brought out the young composer’s distinctive voice.
Although the voice we know him best for was evident mostly in the second movement, the early Piano Trio of Leonard Bernstein, written when the West Side Story composer was a 19-year-old Harvard undergrad, also announces a major talent. The Bernstein closed the first half, and here, too, Klipfel was a standout, playing the rapid scale passages in the middle of the first movement with stellar clarity and dash.
The Morgenstern players clearly enjoyed the wit of the blue-note march that followed, with Hempel offering the first theme after the pizzicato introduction with real style and swagger. And in the finale, all three seemed to relish the Russian-style folk dance middle, which is really the optimal way to make this piece work overall. Its basically eclectic composer had not yet reached a place of stylistic integrity (as he would do 20 years later in his violin concerto, Serenade), so the trio works best when its individual bits are rendered with gusto, as they were here.
The second half of the program was devoted to the Smetana trio, a big and expansive work written as an act of mourning after the death of the composer’s daughter Bedriska from scarlet fever at age 5. Stylistically, it’s also a mixed bag, with Central European folk flavors alternating with motto themes developed in serious Germanic fashion, but Smetana’s melodic gift , his skill at handling this instrumental combination, and the naked emotionalism with which this work is imbued make it a masterwork, and one that’s too little appreciated.
The Morgensterns gave this music all the firepower it requires, starting with Hempel’s intense opening, and then building surely to each of its climaxes without overdoing them. There is a good deal of quasi-orchestral writing for violin and cello over the athletic, difficult piano part, and all three players gave the music a full measure of that effect, playing masterfully.
The second movement, while carefully paced and well-performed, could have used a little more folk lilt to its main theme; it was somewhat straightforward when what it needed was a touch of Czech swing, which would have helped bring out the contrast with the first movement some more. The finale showcased the overall excellence of this threesome, which deftly handled the driving main theme, with its tricky backbeat and rapid pace. Wehse played the contrasting secondary theme meltingly, after which Hempel and Klipfel helped the music soar.
The second movement of the Ravel trio, subtitled Pantoum, served as a delicious encore. Hempel and Wehse played the Asian-influenced main theme with a nervous kind of springiness that was wonderfully evocative, and the trio showed itself absolutely at home with get another compositional aesthetic.
I would gladly have sat there at the Rinker had the Morgenstern Trio decided to play the entire Ravel trio as an encore, and I think most of the small but appreciative audience in the theater would have done the same.