Chamber ensembles tend to form around good-sized clutches of available music--string quartets, piano trios, woodwind quintets0--leaving pieces for less common combinations of instruments to be played by ad hoc ensembles. No surprise, then, that the Jacques Thibaud Trio, which performed Friday evening at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium, is one of only a handful of established string trios. The repertory for violin, viola, and cello is unusually high in quality (including one outright masterpiece, Mozart's E-flat Divertimento, as well as a wealth of excellent music from the past century), but no matter how you look at it, it's awfully small. Throw in a guest pianist, to add the piano quartet repertoire, and it's still small. There aren't all that many full-time piano quartets out there either.

Most regular string trios have been soloist-driven, either comprising three "big-name" soloists or else dominated by one. (Who can name the violist and cellist of the Grumiaux Trio without looking them up?) A few others have succumbed, over time, to the lure of the quartet, picking up a second violinist. England's Cummings Trio became the English Quartet, Switzerland's Carmina Trio the excellent Carmina Quartet.

A few string trios have appeared recently that seem determined to stick it out. Austria's Gaede Trio and England's Leopold Trio have made some terrific recordings of the ensemble's core repertory over the past few years. And now there is the Jacques Thibaud Trio, a German ensemble whose members met as students at the Berlin Arts School some years ago, and have been playing together ever since.

Somewhat full-blown press notices to the contrary, the Thibauds are not virtuosi in the sense that they could easily make careers for themselves as soloists. They are all excellent and fluent players, but none of the three has a particularly sensuous sound--the kind of sound that suggests a destiny as a soloist. Cellist Uwe Hirth-Schmidt has the most conventionally beautiful tone of the three, full and deep. Violinist Burkhard Maiss, though he has a truly amazing bow arm (his deftness and delicacy of articulation were a constant delight), also has a slow, wide, and rather bland vibrato. And the violist, Philip Douvier, while strong, is not always terribly elegant; sometimes (as in the higher bits of Mozart's Divertimento) he sounded downright uncomfortable.

Nor is the trio necessarily immaculate as a trio. Friday night saw a few moments of ragged ensemble, as well as dubious intonation (Maiss, in particular, has a worrisome tendency to drift sharp to his colleagues). And yet, I have rarely attended a chamber concert that impressed me so much.

The Thibauds play their whole repertory from memory, sitting without music stands at what at first seems a surprising distance from one another. Their performance of Schoenberg's Op. 45 string trio was a jaw-dropping display of sheer musicianship such as I have never seen in my life. The piece, about twenty minutes long, is famous among new-music players as a stubbornly tough nut. For the listener there are the barest courtesy handholds, like the bald recapitulation of the beginning near the end; all else is a kaleidoscopic mix of violence and serenity, one tone scarcely set before the next takes over.

For the player…imagine the same tumult of motives and emotions, except that you are yourself in the thick of it and also somehow generating it. Tough enough to keep your place with a nice, explicit road-map in front of you; unbelievably difficult if you are trying to carry both your own road-map and your colleagues' around in your head.

The Thibauds not only kept their heads (and their places); they relied on one another's knowledge to produce the most uncanny synchronicity of gesture and affect. It was a virtuoso performance--lithe, elastic, sure-footed, and shot through with amazing instrumental colors. (The piece is richly riddled with harmonics, natural and artificial--the Thibauds' nonchalant skill with them turned what might have been a very nasty squeak-fest into a sort of permanent halo. Even the most enigmatic chords seemed to be lit from within.)

Earlier, the trio played Beethoven's G major Trio, Op. 9/1--a performance that had one thinking of the piece, with its rapt E-major slow movement and its whirring finale, as the equal of any of the Op. 18 quartets. But if it was the Schoenberg that put me most in awe, it was the Mozart that I most admired.

The longest of all his chamber works and arguably the greatest, Mozart's E-flat Divertimento suffers more than most other string trios from not being a quartet. The late Mozart quartets are played by dedicated, full-time string quartets (and the late quintets by quartets with a guest violist), but K. 563 is mostly the province of trios of celebrity soloists, for whom it is all too often a vehicle for displays of "Mozartean style" or (worse yet) coldly calculated "chamber playing," a slick, prepared phrase from one player meeting an equally slick "response" from another.

The Thibaud players, bless them, didn't sound like that. They played as though they were in love with Mozart, not with themselves. The quality that made the performance special is difficult to name. Best, perhaps, to call it generosity--generosity of musical impulse, of interpretive attention, of communication. Pick out details, and they suggest a finicky or mannered performance, which this wasn't. The sudden, whispery pianissimos, the sometimes extreme bending of tempo, the urge never to play a repeat just like the first time through--all this could have been ghastly, but in this performance it seemed not only natural, but open and communicative. A mysterious but quite amazing achievement, this performance.

(Michelle Dulak is a violinist and violist who has written about music for "Strings," "Stagebill," "Early Music America" and The New York Times.)

©2000 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved