IMMA, Dublin
Shostakovich – Trio No 1; Schumann – Trio No 3;
Ravel – Trio in A minor
As is to be expected from an event promoted by the Association of Music Lovers, this recital by the multi-prize-winning Trio di Parma was a visit to the higher echelons of chamber music.
Perhaps the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Great Hall at Kilmainham proved a tiny fraction more resonant than would have been ideal for the violin-cello-piano combination. Loss of detail to the bright acoustic halo, however, was minimal.
Few trios could improve on this one for sheer calibre of sound. Against the burnished piano playing of Alberto Miodini, Enrico Bronzi constantly secures an ideal cello balance, while the violin tone of Ivan Rabaglia is a model of musicianly integration.
Though instantly recognisable as Shostakovich’s, the single- movement trio he penned in his late teens is less frugal with its material than his mature chamber music tends to be. Its transcendent tunes and stormy outbursts are laden with neo- Romantic potential, and the players realised it with taste.
Schumann’s third and final piano trio, composed four years after his first two, has an incessant choppiness that some would ascribe to the composer’s declining mental health. To be sure, there’s an agitated edginess to the writing that calls for exceptionally alert phrasing.
It got it: no matter how fleeting the snatch of melody, or transient the contrapuntal interjection, each musician registered it with ready and convincing eloquence.
Ravel’s sole piano trio presents challenges of a more architectonic kind. The first movement can quickly wither on reaching its slow central section; the Pantoum can descend into frivolity; the stately Passacaille can forget its dance origins; the finale can lose sight of its ecstatic destination.
Suffice it to say all these problems were solved authoritatively, and with bags of expressive room to spare.
