RDS Concert Hall, Dublin
Schumann – Piano Trio in D minor Op 63; Shostakovich – Piano Trio No 2 in E minor Op 67
This, in my view, is how galas should be done. You engage first-class musicians and let them play masterpieces. That was the case here, for a gala celebrating 40 years of the festival of Music in Great Irish Houses, supported by the Royal Dublin Society, and its recently refurbished concert hall.
The performers were big names who gave outstanding performances.
Violinist Arabella Steinbacher and cellist Daniel Müller-Schott have much in common: young, from Munich, supported by Anne-Sophie Mutter. Their close correspondences resonated in the near-perfect balance and mutual understanding of their playing.
This was perhaps less evident in the Schumann’s unequal distribution of prominence in the first piece, the Clara-filled D minor Piano Trio of 1847. Here, the cello is not second-fiddle but third, coming in behind both the piano – played dynamically here by Robert Kulek who weaved seamlessly in and out from the primary pairing – and, more especially, the violin. For a piece in D minor it spends much time in the major, creating warmth and rejoicing as well as passion, qualities which were all beautifully channelled in Steinbacher’s exquisitely firm but light-voiced and expressive playing.
This emotional spectrum was expanded further to include grief and anger in Shostakovich’s E minor Trio Op. 67 from 1944. There is even horror: a Jewish dance tune appears in the finale, said to be in response to reports that the Nazis were forcing death-camp victims to dance on their own graves before execution.
It was here that Müller-Schott fully matched his superlative partner, from the eerie precision of his opening harmonics, in music that lamented the passing of Shostakovich’s close friend Ivan Sollertinsky and poured bitter scorn on the evil of “the final solution”.
