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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Gil Shaham Lynn Harrell
November 1, 2006
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Three's Company By Michelle Dulak Thomson
Of all the chamber music genres, it's the piano trio that took most naturally to the big stage. There is still an association of privacy and intimacy around the string quartet, for example, more than 200 years after Haydn brought string quartets into his London concerts. But the piano trio — that alliance of the three most common concerto solo instruments — seems intrinsically more "public." Also, star players routinely get together for piano trio recitals in a way that they don't for string quartets.
Perhaps they recognize that something in the medium can accommodate a bunch of outsize personalities in the manner that the string quartet can't. On Wednesday evening, pianist Yefim Bronfman, violinist Gil Shaham, and cellist Lynn Harrell, all well-known soloists in their own right, came together under the auspices of Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall in a convincing demonstration that some pieces can stand any amount of star power.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways of playing chamber music in a hall the size of Zellerbach. One is to play as though you're in a smaller hall, and leave it more or less to the audience to reconcile the acoustical and musical scales. The other is to do the reconciling yourself, by playing deliberately to the scale of the space. Neither is pitfall-free, of course. The danger in the first case is of failing to connect with the audience. The possibly larger danger in the second is of connecting, yes, but with something quite different from what you intended the audience to hear. Bronfman, Shaham, and Harrell decidedly took the second way, and in general they made it work quite well.
Their choice of program didn't hurt, of course. Schubert's E-flat Major Trio and Tchaikovsky's A-Minor Trio are arguably the two largest works in the piano trio repertory — grand in conception, scale, rhetoric, and expressive range. Both also, and not incidentally, impose enormous technical demands on all three players. This is enticing territory for virtuosos on the level of this threesome.
The standard of playing was high, indeed. I don't think Shaham, for one, has ever sounded better. His gleaming, powerful tone was a constant joy, as was his variety of articulation and vibrato. In all of that Harrell was his equal. He poured out rich cello sound in the middle registers and achieved a wonderfully sonorous, glowing timbre on the C string. Both spent much of the afternoon playing at volumes that would have carried them easily over the top of a full orchestra. And indeed they needed to, since Bronfman, hardly a shrinking violet even at his most decorous, conceived both piano parts on a robustly symphonic scale. (The piano lid, naturally, was fully up: no hedging here.)
Grand music, tailormade for three stars
It is a piece for three outsize, virtuoso personalities. There's string writing reminiscent of the concertmaster solos from the ballets (or the first-violin and first-cello duet in the Souvenir de Florence), and piano writing straight out of the First Concerto. There's a reason why, even in this day of numerous, dedicated full-time piano trios, the work remains largely the province of celebrity threesomes like this one. Certainly, it warmly rewarded the extravagant resources of tone and fire the trio lavished on it.
If there was a flaw, it was one of pacing. The piece — the first movement in particular — by nature spends an awful lot of its time at the top of the dynamic range. Some method has to be found to impart a shape to the long stretches of music all marked fortissimo. Bronfman and colleagues were sometimes content just to let it rip and keep on ripping, for pages at a time. This, combined with a curious fastidiousness about rubato, made some passages seem to hit a ceiling and just stay there until they wound down again.
That said, the sheer might of the combined sound was certainly impressive. And when there was a respite, the quiet playing (as in, for example, the first movement's luscious B-Major theme and the opening of the variations) was exquisite.
Schubert's Trio in E-flat Major (D. 929) on the first half of the program saw the players in an equally outgoing mood, tempered to the different demands of the piece. The trio is one of those vast late-Schubert masterworks that seem to overflow its molds. The finale, which unusually reprises part of the slow movement, is so long that for many years a big chunk of it was traditionally cut, although not on Wednesday night. (Tchaikovsky's Variazione finale, interestingly, has a traditional cut as well, which one the players mercifully observed.)
Bronfman reined himself in a bit for the Schubert, and managed an unusual degree of clarity in some of the more finicky parts of the finale. The string playing, meanwhile, was large in scale but not unnaturally so, and full of detail and of color. The timbral delights were manifold: Harrell's burnished tone in the slow movement's theme and Shaham's vibrant zing in the Scherzo were only two among many. And then there was that extraordinary sinking down and down into the first movement's development section, where all three players dared a bare whisper of sound.
Shaham and Harrell, there and in the Tchaikovsky, seemed to be having a terrific time responding to one another. There was much exchanging of glances and much subtle matching of vibrato and articulation. Only in off-the-string passages did the sense that the playing was being pushed to fill the acoustical space become oppressive. Both players, especially Harrell, affected an extremely vertical spiccato that must have projected well to the balcony but sounded crude and ugly up close.
The encore, the finale of Mozart's C-Major Trio (K. 548), was playful and deft, carried along by Shaham's elegance and Bronfman's uncharacteristically light touch.
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Yefim Bronfman
