SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD UK CONCERT

Fauré, Harrington, Ravel: Erato Piano Trio (Yuri Kalnits, violin; Julia Morneweg, cello; John Paul Elkins, piano), Reardon-Smith Theatre, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 7.3.2010 (GPu)

Fauré: Piano Trio in D minor, Op.120
Harrington: Twisted Reverie
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor

Master and pupil; but by the time that Ravel’s trio was premiered in Paris on 28 January 1915, his studies with Fauré at the Conservatoire in that city were long over. And, by a kind of historical irony, Fauré’s solitary piano trio was not premiered until 12 May 1923, some eight years after that of his erstwhile student.

Fauré’s trio was his penultimate work, the work of a sick man, written between August 1922 and the early months of 1923. Despite increasing ill-health, in particular, a painful condition of deafness of which Fauré was making mention as early as 1903, he remained director of the Conservatoire until 1920. The trio – some of it written at the home of his friends the Maillots at their home near the beautiful Lac d’Annecy in the Haute Savoie – is necessarily a work with a strong element of the retrospective. Written in its composer’s mid to late seventies, the trio is decidedly the music of old age; its serenity exists in the knowledge of death’s approach; its energies are remembered as much as current (even in the relative violence of the closing allegro vivo). Perhaps it was not surprising that some of the emotional depths of this essentially introspective work of old age should have eluded the young and very talented musicians of the Erato Trio. In the opening movement Julia Morneweg played the long, lyrical first theme with plenty of feeling and the trio as a whole communicated a good deal of the movement’s complex structure, even if the interplay between instruments occasionally seemed a little stiff and relatively unyielding. The long andantino was studded with beautiful moments, especially towards its close, the shot-silk textures with their ambiguities of self-reflection and memory and their unexpected harmonic resolutions were well realized. In some earlier pages however, the full magic of the movement sometimes evaded the trio’s grasp. They were more consistently impressive in the more outward-facing music of the closing allegro, beginning as it did with a good sense of drama (or at least as near to the dramatic as this subtlest of works ever comes). The playing here had a more assured and natural sense of interplay and musical dialogue.

Ravel’s trio is a more openly extrovert work, less full of enigmas than that of Fauré and the Erato Trio – formed only in 2005 at the Royal College of Music in London – treated the audience to an impressive reading of it. The opening movement (marked modéré) danced persuasively, the music revolving around Ravel’s pedal-points with commendable clarity. The Basque inflections of the opening theme were painted with a light touch and the second theme had a pleasing suavity to it. The second movement, the Pantoum, got sprightly treatment, the whole both engaged and engaging. The chorale-like melody in F major was played with particular beauty, the alternations of thematic materials handled with a clear sense of form and purpose (and the group’s concentration was not disturbed when their cellist lost her bow on the final note of the movement!). In the third movement, John Paul Elkins’ initial statement of the theme in the lower register of the piano created a feeling of spaciousness which was sustained throughout, as Ravel constantly changes the patterns of duet and trio. There was an edge of melancholy to the reading, but any temptation to wallow in this was avoided, and there was real beauty in the movement’s close, as the textual density was reduced and the movement sank back into silence – a silence immediately succeeded by the vivacity of Ravel’s ‘Final’. Here the Erato Trio were particularly satisfying, their precision of ensemble and their unity of purpose particularly striking; the considerable technical demands of the music left them altogether unfazed and the alternations between 5/4 and 7/4 time were integrated into a unified approach to the larger shape of the movement; without inappropriate inflation of effect, the decidedly orchestral nature of Ravel’s writing in this last movement was given powerful expression.

Between these two French trios the Erato sprang an unprogrammed surprise. In the days before the concert the Trio had spent some time working with student composers at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. They had evidently been especially impressed by the work of one of those young composers, David Harrington, since they chose to give a world premiere of his Twisted Reverie. A single-movement work, Twisted Reverie was characterized by some emphatically accented phrasing, by a series of intense motifs thrown rapidly from instrument to instrument, by its use of brief fragments which coalesced and collided in interesting ways, while slower, more lyrical interludes balanced the work’s exclamatory attacks. Harrington’s writing was well-judged instrumentally – that for the cello seemed particularly effective – and there was a real sense of musical conversation between instrumental equals. There appeared – on admittedly very limited evidence – to be real promise here. The young composer came up to take a deserved bow and to congratulate/thank the Trio.

The Erato Trio is already an accomplished ensemble, and there is every reason to imagine that as they mature further they will be capable of even more in future years.

Glyn Pursglove