San Francisco Classical Voice

The Con Brio Trio is, in the first place, an all-star group. Violinist Kay Stern, a founder of the Lark Quartet, is currently concertmaster of the San Francisco Opera. Violist Benjamin Simon, currently teaching at UC, Berkeley, has held posts at Stanford and Harvard Universities and played with the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Cellist Gianna Abondolo teaches at UC Berkeley and Mills College, and does concert improvisations for dancers. What distinguished their playing went well beyond mere technique. These are friends who simply like each other and enjoy playing chamber music together. You just don't get to hear string trio performances these days; and, if you do, you'll not encounter a finer group than this.

Haydn wrote rather a lot of string trios, 36 in fact, plus another 60 maybes that were published under his name. The two-movement example on this concert is curious. The first movement is one of those compound forms Haydn experimented with late in his career: a quasi-sonata form laid out as to hint at a rondo and/or a free set of complex variations. That's followed by a Presto finale in Haydn's folksy Hungarian style. Oddly, it all sounded like familiar music, although I had definitely never heard the work as a trio before. (It turns out to be a contemporaneous, anonymous transcription of a Haydn piano sonata, Hob. XVI:40.)

Even more of a surprise, Harrison's single-movement Trio reflected his studies with Arnold Schoenberg. Basically an arch form, his short Trio rises to a dramatic outbreak before fading back into its opening Lento. It might well be mistaken for a Berg composition. It all went to show how beautiful an effect can be made with atonal means when the composer knows what he's doing. The Trio gives no hint of Harrison's later Pan-Pacific works or the sense of simplicity he chose when he was an assistant to Virgil Thomson, a reviewer on the New York Herald Tribune.

Schubert left us three Trios, counting the early lost one D.112, and this D. 471 which has only one performable movement. (A second is only a wisp of a sketch.) It wasn't until a year later in 1817 that he got around to writing a full Trio, and that also happens to be in B-flat Major. More than most early Schubert, the unfinished one leans heavily toward Haydn. Only here and there does one sense a true Schubertian touch, and that mostly in the harmony. What is curious is that, after these three early tries, he never took up the medium again.

The same is true of Beethoven, whose early forays into string chamber music were all string trios. One carries his Op. 3 designation, another a Serenade, Op. 8 and the three Trios of his Op. 9. That was that before he turned his full headlights on creating string quartets. The Op.9 set all reflect their time a bit, the end of the 18th Century when Beethoven was newly settled in Vienna and trying to make an impression. So there are also daring elements, especially in the first movement and the whirligig perpetual motion of the finale.

I mentioned taste. The subtle playing of the Con Brio Trio encompassed all sorts of little touches — for one obvious example, vibrato. Harrison's trio movement is cut from much of the same cloth Berg used. But this isn't Berg, it is Harrison. It needs, and received, a lighter feeling of soul than would be appropriate for a Berg composition. So, too, they played the Beethoven, with wit and charm rather than the heavy accents and violent dynamic shifts demanded for later Beethoven. For Haydn, they added a tad more sparkle, and for Schubert, a more velvety timbre.

There were no encores and no announcements of the Trio's future plans. Pity, for the Con Brio Trio is a group to be savored at every possible opportunity. To revert to an old cliché: highest possible recommendation.