★★★★☆
As usual under virus restrictions no applause followed Wigmore Hall’s audience-free lunchtime concert. But laughter? Out it came gurgling from the performers’ mouths, seconds after Schubert’s immensely good-natured B-flat Piano Trio, D898, had sprung its last joke: an uptempo coda fading away only to be punctured by two definitive, very loud chords. The joke couldn’t have come as any surprise to the Gould Piano Trio; its scores’ little rips and dog-eared corners immediately told us how long the work has been in its repertoire. The ensemble was founded more than 25 years ago.
A far bigger clue to the musicians’ collective experience and wisdom was the uniformly high quality of the playing. The trio’s cellist, Richard Lester, might have been with them for only two years, but every cautionary glance, joint attack and precisely placed chord revealed total togetherness and a family bond.
Right from Schubert’s entrancing opening — Benjamin Frith’s piano delicately picking out the theme, Lester offering succulent plucked notes, with light staccato stabs from Lucy Gould’s violin — we knew we were in chamber music heaven.
A special Schubert heaven too, where the composer’s long-legged melodies never end and the material keeps circling as if trapped on a roundabout, but with never a sense of wasted time.
The music’s sheer merriment was equally a delight and the perfect lockdown tonic. Yet no musician got tipsy: indeed, the faster the tempo, the tighter the ensemble spirit seemed. This was equally true in the concert’s curtain-raiser, the 1938 A minor Piano Trio of the American groundbreaker Amy Beach. Her last substantial work, it’s notably more individual, concise and kaleidoscopic than earlier chamber pieces, Brahmsian in tendency and largesse. Variously ardent, meditative and sprightly, and laced with references to Inuit folk songs, the work fell gratefully under the musicians’ fingers.
Visually, the concert’s streamed presentation offered the usual unfussy Wigmore parade of shots from the front, back and sides, occasionally pierced by vertigo-inducing ceiling views. Lester, I briefly noted, sported interesting pale blue shoelaces, but what price adventurous footwear next to the passion and beauty of Schubert and Beach, and the wonderful Gould threesome?
