Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky: Piano Trios
allmusic.com
Review by Mike D. Brownell
Written in response to the tragic and deeply-felt death of his friend and mentor Nikolai Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky's A minor Piano Trio represents his only foray into a genre that he had previous found undesirable. Writing in tribute to Rubinstein yielded a massive, elegiac first movement and a lighter but hardly frivolous set of eleven variations, each of which represents a memory of Rubinstein's life. The elegiac style for piano trios caught on quickly among Russian composers; the young Rachmaninov produced two such works, the first of which -- a soulful, one-movement work -- is heard on this album. Performing on this Champs Hill Records album is the Gould Piano Concerto. The ensemble not only plays with meticulous technical skill, pristine intonation, and close attention to details in the score, but they also manage to put forth convincing, engaging performances of compositions that can all too often become overwrought and even sappy. Instead of using excessive amounts of rubato, the Gould Trio uses a broad dynamic range to shape phrases and accentuate highlights. Balance within the trio is generally quite good; neither of the strings is ever unnecessarily obscured by the more densely scored piano. The only possible thing lacking in this recording is a richer, meatier bass sound in both the cello and piano left hand.
An uplifting elegy
Erik Levi enjoys virtuosic Tchaikovsky from the Gould Piano Trio
BBC Music Magazine
With its epic sweep and passages of intoxicating virtuosity, Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio seems the ideal work for high profile soloists wishing to perform chamber music. The catalogue boasts many recordings featuring an all-star cast, the most recent of which from Lang Lang, Vadim Repin and Mischa Maisky on DG received a strong endorsement in these pages (Christmas issue, 2009). Yet even greater dividends can accrue from performances given by long-established chamber ensembles that have grappled with the work's many interpretative challenges, not least unifying its sprawling design.
Such qualities are very much to the fore in this beautifully recorded performance from the Gould Piano Trio. Its players follow the composer's directions to the letter, bringing a natural flow to the various difficult changes in tempo in the first movement and mapping its emotional narrative most convincingly. Likewise they bring freshness, panache, charm and infinite variety to the second movement variations. Highlights include a brilliantly characterised fugue and the ensuing impressionistic Andante flebile introversion from the opening of the piece. In the finale, Benjamin Frith impressively negotiates Tchaikovsky's full-blooded piano writing without coarsening the tone. If the performance here seems less exultant than in the DG recording, the Goulds are more compelling in plumbing the depths of despair in the coda. Both ensembles offer the early Rachmaninov Trio as a coupling, and although there's little to choose between the two versions the Goulds adopt more subtle timbral effects in the mysterious string passage work that accompanies some of the impassioned melodies.
Performance *****
Recording *****
Rachmaninoff: Trio élégiaque No1, CD review
Tchaikovsky: Piano Trio. Gould Piano Trio
Rating: * * * * *
The Daily Telegraph By Geoffrey Norris
It is all too easy for these two piano trios to get bogged down in sentiment and density of texture, but the Gould finds a way of keeping the fabric transparent and airy while maintaining the elegiac tone that governs both of them. Rachmaninoff clearly had Tchaikovsky’s trio of 1881-2 as a model when he wrote his first, single-movement Trio élégiaque a decade later, and they make a persuasive coupling in performances of taste and sincere passion.
MusicWeb
At the outset I should say that Champs Hill Records assure me that despite the fact that these performances were recorded back in 2005, this album is a first release and not a reissue as some readers might suspect!
Having got that out of the way, I would hasten to add that these performances are polished, nicely blended and heartfelt. It would be difficult to imagine more robust, sensitive and responsive playing of these Late-Romantic works.
Tchaikovsky’s epic Trio with its widely varied moods and brilliant colours proved to be very influential upon this musical genre. He was asked to write a piano trio by his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck (whose resident piano trio included, as pianist, a French teenager, called Claude Debussy). At first reluctant, Tchaikovsky then changed his mind on the news of the death of his friend and critic, Nikolai Rubinstein in March 1881. The work was composed in Rome. Its imposing 19-minute, opening movement brims with melodies and is passionate and lyrical. The Gould Trio give it attack aplenty in its vigorous moments and touching tenderness in the quieter passages. The second movement is a set of inspired variations that includes: a waltz, a mazurka, and a brilliant little evocation of a music-box. It is thought that one variation was written in memory of a trip to an Amusement Park and another to a ball. The concluding movement, some 12 minutes long, is another exciting and vivacious variation and finale. Yet it ends in grief with a Chopinesque funeral march; presumably, Tchaikovsky had the passing of Rubinstein in mind.
Rachmaninov’s brief but haunting single-movement Trio élégiaque No. 1 is pure rapture in the hands of the Gould Piano Trio. Rachmaninov wrote two Trio élégiaques; they were written in quick succession in 1892 and 1893. The three-movement second Trio élégiaque is much better known. It was written under the influence of the news of Tchaikovsky’s death. - Tchaikovsky had encouraged Rachmaninov when he was a student. But this Trio élégiaque No. 1 in G minor was written in white-heat fervour in January 1892. It was premiered in a recital that the 18-year-old Rachmaninov gave at the Moscow Conservatory where he was still a student and, at the time, just 18 years old. It is a remarkably assured composition for one so young, which makes it so much more incredible and sad that this performance was its first and last in Rachmaninov’s lifetime. It was not published until 1947. Maybe this was not so surprising considering that it was written at such a great speed for that first performance. The score contained many errors and an almost complete lack of dynamic markings. Heavy editing was therefore necessary. Why is the term élégiaque applied to this trio? There appears to be no personality suggested. Malcolm MacDonald suggests that Rachmaninov had been suffering from depression after ill-health in the previous year. Indeed, a sense of isolation and desolation is apparent from its opening and closing pages. Not surprisingly, the piano part is given pride of place in this trio, such that it is almost a miniature piano concerto. Yet there is grateful lyrical writing for both string instruments.
I must applaud Malcolm MacDonald’s erudite and illuminating booklet notes; a model of their kind.
Polished performances of two outstanding works in the Piano Trio genre.
Guardian
Chandos continues to fly the flag for neglected 20th-century British music with this excellently played selection of Cyril Scott's chamber music. All the major works here, except the first piano trio, were composed after the second world war, and all but the clarinet quintet are recorded here for the first time. Taken individually, the pieces are impressive – fluent, and well structured, with the Debussyan influences of especially the first piano trio well integrated into what is fundamentally a late romantic idiom.
BBC Music Magazine
Performance *****
Sound ****
Between them Chandos and Dutton have totally transformed the Cyril Scott discography in the past few years, so that we begin to know this elusive and prolific composer much better; but there are still treasures to find. Chandos continues the process with a valuable disc of chamber music. Only one piece-the expansive, passionate and highly-coloured Piano Trio no.1- dates from Scott’s period of greatest celebrity as the ‘English Debussy’. The excellent Gould Trio are the stalwarts of this enjoyable disc.
BBC Music Magazine, Wigmore Live CD
James Macmillan's Fourteen Little Pieces for piano trio are only "little" in clock time. Taken together (they unfold continuously) they add up to one of MacMillan's most convincing large scale structures. At the same time the need to concentrate thoughts and feelings into tiny spans gives his characteristic intensity extra bite and focus. The style is MacMillan at his least audience friendly.
The keening Celtic lyricism of many MacMillan scores is there, along with the familiar bluntly primitive gestures (especially the ending). But the twilit, haunted mood and fragmentary whispered textures, especially in the earlier movements, veer closer to the world of Schoenbergian expressionism than one usually expects in MacMillan.
In the end - as so often with MacMillan's music - one wonders what kind of drama, or ritual, is being enacted here? Does the number 14 invite direct comparison with the Stations of the Cross? The three excellent musicians of the Gould Trio make every detail tell in this live performance, while ensuring that the sense of mysterious progress is not lost.
They're also very fine in the Schubert Trio, steering a mid-course between Trio Wanderer's bracing Classicism (on Harmonia Mundi) and the Beaux Arts Trio's finely shaded Romanticism (on Philips). Benjamin Frith's delicious repeated notes in the finales are specially memorable. Clear, well-balanced recordings, with minimal obtrusive audience noises, serve the music making very well.
Performance *****
Recording ****
The Independent, March 2009, Wigmore Live CD
Has James MacMillan swallowed the Oxford Dictionary of Music? It's not often that you see the marking "strepitoso" (boisterous), but this is just one colour in his 1997 series of miniatures for piano trio, 'Fourteen Little Pictures'. Rebarbative, fidgety, wistful and, in the final movement, brooding, his snapshots are realised as meticulously and elegantly as Schubert's Piano Trio in E flat in this live performance by the Gould Piano Trio. Beautifully balanced, this bizarre juxtaposition of composers works suprisingly well.
Pick of the Album: The superb performance of Schubert's 'Finale: Allegro moderato'
Sunday Times, February 2009. Wigmore Live, Macmillan/Schubert disc
Restraint is the obvious hallmark of the Gould Trio’s performance of Schubert’s great, expansive, late E flat major piano trio, recorded at a Wigmore Hall concert last July. Anything labelled “allegro” (as three of the four movements are) is taken at a speed more cautious. This suits the piece perfectly, for it is poised on that knife edge between sadness and contentment, and any hint of abandon might destroy that balance. This beautiful performance is preceded by a vivid reading of James MacMillan’s Fourteen Little Pictures (1997). It’s a compelling, 23-minute piano suite, relying on extreme contrasts of mood, texture and colour, and ending with a single tolling bass note.
Tim Homfray The Strad October 2008
Schubert’s other great piano trio, the one in E flat major, featured in the Gould Piano Trio’s concert at the Wigmore Hall on 17 July. The players opened with Mozart’s B flat major Trio K502, which received crisp playing, full of charm, with an easy humour in the second movement. It was followed by James MacMillan’s 14 Little Pictures from 1997, a set of miniatures run together into a work of often haunting eloquence, here from cellist Alice Neary in particular. Violinist Lucy Gould had moments of birdlike twittering, and indeed there were times when both string players sounded like a couple of mournful tenor seagulls. Their performance of the Schubert was monumental. The first movement built up to a coda of tremendous grandeur, and Neary was notable again in the second, with her playing beautifully simple at the opening. The second theme here was played with a captivating, slightly exaggerated lilt, and the climaxes had huge power and majesty.
Sunday Times, January 2008 RNCM Mozart Festival
As for Mozart’s writing for string trio, a rapturously nimble performance by the Gould Piano Trio (with the viola player James Boyd substituting for the pianist) of the late Divertimento in E flat, K563, left no doubt that this six-movement suite is a precursor both in form and sublimity to Beethoven’s late quartets.
Reviews for the Gould Piano Trio's recent CD
Brahms, Piano Trios - Volume One
Quartz - QTZ2011
Reviewed in The Sunday Times, 30 January 2005
The hyper-self-critical Brahms destroyed more chamber music than he published. Luckily, the B major piano trio, written when he was only 21, escaped. Many years later, he revised and tightened it in a composite version that preserved and enhanced the magnificent sweep and energy of the original. By contrast, the late C major trio, masterly though it is, wants something of the B major’s freshness of inspiration; but the performance by the Gould Trio is so good – strong, passionate and at the same time delicate – that you are hardly conscious of any lack. They are equally fine in the glorious B major.
Reviewed in The Observer, 17 April 2005
The first of a three-volume, set of complete Brahms trios, with the rest (including horn and clarinet trios) to follow at six-monthly intervals, this elegant, spirited coupling of the first and second piano trios bodes well for the rest of the cycle. Cellist Alice Neary and pianist Benjamin Frith have developed a deep musical understanding with violinist Lucy Gould as her trio tour the UK, Europe and the US in this repertoire, combining a youthful freshness with virtuoso panache as their talents merge into a richly cohesive whole.
Reviewed in The Daily Telegraph, 18 June 2005
The Gould Piano Trio have won plaudits for recordings of Mendelssohn and Beethoven. Here, they are just as persuasive in two contrasting trios by Brahms: the youthful, lyrically expansive B major - drastically revised by the composer in his fifties - and the glorious C major, no less luxuriant in its themes, but far tauter in their development.
Compared with some other groups, the Gould may initially seem to favour Classical restraint over heroic, full-blooded Romanticism. But it soon emerges that their refinement and emphasis on light, lucid textures by no means preclude an authentic Brahmsian intensity.
The Gould are especially good at seeing a movement whole; and if an apparent climax seems underplayed, it will always be because they are eyeing the real climax later in the piece. They have a subtle feeling, too, for the expressive crux of Brahms's long, arching phrases. Both the darting, crepuscular scherzos gain from the Gould's unusual delicacy of touch, while their rarefied playing of the B major's adagio is as moving as any of their emotionally charged rivals.
From the Gramophone, April 2005
Lucy Gould and her colleagues play Op 8’s first movement suavely, with lovely tone and refined expression…In the Scherzo…the Gould Trio, with their lightness of touch , make a special, slightly sinister effect in the quiet passages and, by this delicacy, enhance the explosive impact of the sudden fortes…Benjamin Frith’s ringing tone and virtuoso panache making the most of the brilliant piano writing…the Gould’s superb control and rhythmic precision brings the symphonic argument of the first movement and the Scherzo’s nocturnal rustlings into sharp relief.
