If the Beaux Arts Trio makes one think of clarity, elegance and the scrupulously blended ensemble that makes them well-suited to Classical and early Romantic music, then the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio offers a more energized, emotionally direct, and openly virtuosic sensibility, one that shines most brightly in the late-Romantic repertoire.
The program heard Monday evening at Ravinia’s Martin Theatre played to these strengths and, marking 20 fruitful years of stellar chamber music performances, the husband-and-wife team of violinist Jamie Laredo and cellist Sharon Robinson, along with pianist Joseph Kalichstein demonstrated the superb interpretive ensemble skill that has kept them in the first rank of chamber music groups over the last two decades.
Few music conservatory directors have enjoyed such an homage as that Tchaikovsky paid to his friend and mentor Nicholas Rubinstein in his Piano Trio in A Minor. The Tchaikovsky trio has long been a specialty of these three musicians, and if Monday night’s performance wasn’t always the most polished of readings, there was no slighting of the deep emotions of Tchaikovsky’s intensely felt tribute. The first movement had a wonderfully idiomatic feel, Jaime Laredo’s melting rendering of the very Russian second theme done with great Slavic throb and expression. The wide-ranging variations of the second movement had a cumulative sense of forward-flowing momentum, each individually characterized with great style.
Perhaps the concluding virtuosic pages were a little too turbo-charged, but the dirgelike coda was rendered with great spacious feeling, Tchaikovsky’s homage made manifest in this eloquent performance.
Written for the KLR Trio in 1993, Leon Kirchner’s Piano Trio No. 2 inhabits a gnarly modernist aesthetic, although the music is actually less impenetrable than Kirchner’s notes describing it. Attacking the jagged angularities and Bartokian broken-chord dissonances with full-metal intensity, the KLR Trio brought an almost physical intensity to its playing. Cellist Sharon Robinson conveyed a striking anguish in her solo, and the spare, broken lyricism of the coda was beautifully handled, the players evoking a sense of heartbroken nostalgia and an unsettled sense of resolution in this tough but strangely moving music.
The concert began with a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Trio in G Major, Opus 1, No. 2. If the robust, full-blooded playing gave somewhat short shrift to the more Classical elements of this early work, the performance demonstrated enough of the embryonic subversion of Beethoven to show why this music set Papa Haydn’s wig a-spin. While the burly witticisms and the manic energy of the tearaway finale were thrown off with irresistible flair, it was the striking Largo that was most notable.
