The Guardian, Rian Evans
Four Stars

Brahms and his friendship with Clara Schumann have been the subject of much recent attention, leaving Robert Schumann sidelined, so the Gould Piano Trio’s weekend of his chamber music helped to refocus matters for Cardiff audiences.

“Such is the intimacy of this repertoire and the Goulds’ insight, that it was not a question of sitting back and going with the romantic flow, rather of being made aware of future tragedy implicit in the writing.”

In the opening Piano Trio in D minor Op 63, the immediacy of being plunged into Schumann’s complex emotional world – real and imagined – was almost shocking. With hints of Mozart’s piano concerto and of Mendelssohn’s Trio in the same troubled key, the listener was drawn into a maelstrom: to suggest that it was deeply unsettling is a compliment to the players. Towards the end of the anguished slow movement, an apprehensive hovering seems to signal the eruption of further turmoil, but what emerges in the finale is a rush of bright, determined optimism. The suspicion that it might be only a veneer was as affecting as the anguish. After this, Mendelssohn’s Op 45 Sonata for cello and piano, played with deep sensitivity by Alice Neary and Benjamin Frith, felt like respite.

Viola player David Adams joined the trio for Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E flat major, Op 47. The series was titled Inner Voices, Outer Worlds – ensuring that the composer’s delicately and often painfully poised mental equilibrium could not be far from one’s consciousness.

“Yet the trio’s rigorous approach meant nothing was overstated or overindulged. Unsullied singing melodies could be happily seized and the cantabile Andante had an unaffected warmth, with the finale’s tense counterpoint leading to an exhilarating climax.”

The Concert:

Gould Piano Trio
David Adams, viola
‘Inner Voices, Outer Worlds’
Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff
October 2014

Schumann Piano Trio in D minor, op 63
Mendelssohn Sonata for cello and piano, op. 45
Schumann Piano Quartet in E flat major, op, 47

photo: classicalsource.com