Trio Solisti live up

To their clippings

BY HARRY SCHROEDER

The fourth concert of the season by the Impromptu Concert organization was presented on Sunday at Saint Paul’s, with music by Trio Solisti: Maria Bachmann, violin, Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello, and Adam Neiman, piano. This is the same group, with one substitution, which gave an excellent concert in the Impromptu series almost exactly two years ago. This time they played music by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and the 20th century Spanish composer, Joaquin Turina. The New Yorker once called this group the most exciting piano trio in America, and on Sunday they demonstrated why.

Of the program, the pieces by Mendelssohn and Beethoven (the “Archduke Trio”) were familiar, and, as this group played them, very welcome. The Turina piece was new to me. It is a very interesting composition, modern without relying on dissonance. At times there were two lines going which seemed individually to have almost nothing to do with one another, but together they worked beautifully. I want to hear that piece again.

As to the players: Ms. Bachmann’s violin had a relatively small controlled sound. She seemed often on the edge of playing too much vibrato, but she never went over it. Her playing was in tune and expressive even at the very top of the instrument’s range, where aging ears like mine could barely hear it.

Mr. Neiman, the pianist, is the newest member of the group — he joined it just this year — but one would never know that from his playing. He has a fine legato touch, and his dynamics were consistently right — which isn’t always the case at St. Paul’s. His playing served not only as the strings’ accompanist but also as an integral part of the ensemble.

If there was one standout, it was, as it was two years ago, Ms. Gerlach. Her cello sound was perfectly centered, with that make-it-sound-easy quality which only the best players can produce. The music in this program was mostly concerted, so she had few solo passages, but in all of them her playing was expressive without ever being overdone. And she played one passage, in the last movement of the Beethoven, which was one of those moments in music one remembers for years.

All three musicians played superbly. But the strength of this group was how well they played together. The strings’ phrasing was a model of precision, even when the pitches were two octaves apart. Even in the last movement of the Mendelssohn, which went off at a nearly unbelievable speed, their precision did not falter. I couldn’t tell whether it was the result of their playing or the structure of the compositions, but often the two of them sounded like a much larger string group. This was especially true in the third movement of the Beethoven. The harmonization there, of a lovely simple melody, is not complex — it is just that Beethoven knew how to get the maximum richness out of those two strings, and they played it for that quality, and got it. Neither Ms. Bachmann nor Ms. Gerlach showed any hesitation about hitting her instrument hard. One would think that an aggressive bow stroke on a string would tighten it slightly and so drive it momentarily out of tune, but their every note was true at the moment of attack. This was especially effective in the several powerful and dramatic endings of movements. At their highest dynamic levels the three of them — only three — filled the whole church with sound.

[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]