Intense, nourishing playing from the Gould Piano Trio at the Wigmore … the give-and-take between the three musicians – in pieces by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Shostakovich – was mysterious and tremendous.
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One reason the evening was so enjoyable was that the three players – violinist Lucy Gould, cellist Richard Lester and pianist Benjamin Frith – have such an easy unanimity of sound. That electric eye-to-eye communication that makes some groups thrilling to watch as well as listen to wasn’t evident; the give-and-take simply happened in some mysterious and invisible way.
Another is that the programme carried us irresistibly from one utterly distinct emotional world to another, beginning with Mozart’s Piano Trio No 4, a piece that has the ambiguous beauty of a weeping willow: you can’t decide whether it’s more sad or graceful. It’s one of Mozart’s works where the music’s stuff seems quite plain, and what makes it heavenly is the way all the parts are in such perfect balance.
The three players grasped this perfectly, especially in the innocent middle movement which seems at first like a dream of a courtly dance, but then a powerful harmonic surprise comes along and you realise it’s not just exquisite.
Then we were onto Mendelssohn’s Second Piano Trio, one of his late works where turbulent feelings threaten to overwhelm the music’s classically balanced surface. It’s all dark storminess, until the moment when a new idea arrives which is like the sun breaking through the clouds, a feeling the trio caught beautifully by relaxing the tempo just a fraction.
Another aspect of Mendelssohn they were super-alert to is the way he leads the music to a point of maximum stillness, to make the return of the opening storminess all the more impressive.
The gentle rocking motion of the second movement, the elfin third movement (again with something steely underneath) and the finale, with its triumphant German hymn tune arriving to banish doubt and distress, all came over with blazing conviction.
So far so wonderful. Then came Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio of 1944, a piece that was ostensibly inspired by the death of a close friend, but which is impossible to hear now without feeling in those spectral melodies the shadow of Stalin’s Great Terror and the Second World War.
…when the music comes to life and becomes by turns savage and sardonic, the players rose to its challenges, magnificently. Finally, the music subsided with surprising speed to a strange cold-grey radiance. Is this a glimmer of hope or simply the cessation of torment?
It’s one of the most poignantly ambiguous endings in all music, which this performance left hanging on the air with peculiar force.
