Schubert Piano Trios

Schubert’s two Piano Trios are amongst his greatest works, contrasted both within themselves and between each other although written within weeks of each other. The B flat has a superficially contented character at the start, but even here clouds seem to come across the sky at increasingly frequent intervals. The E flat is a more obviously dramatic work throughout, and the curiously ambiguous march of the slow movement is surely some of the most inspired music Schubert ever wrote.

This new double-album by pianist Lars Vogt, violinist Christian Tetzlaff and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff includes some of Franz Schubert’s (1797–1828) greatest works of chamber music, including his Piano Trios and the Arpeggione Sonata, in breath-taking interpretations. Franz Schubert wrote his two numbered Piano Trios, as well as the Notturno for piano trio, during the very last months in his life, in 1827 and 1828. Like Beethoven, Schubert’s final works in chamber music are masterpieces of great emotional depth. The famous Arpeggione Sonata (1824) and Rondo for violin and piano (1826) were written slightly earlier, but can also be counted among Schubert’s late works.

In their second album for Resonus, the Gould Piano Trio returns with a recording of Franz Schubert’s Piano Trios. Apart from a very early single movement written when he was fifteen years of age, Schubert came to the piano trio late in his short career and left only two full-length works in the form, written in 1827–8. By the time Schubert came to write his piano trios, the form had taken on a new stature thanks to work from composers such as Beethoven. Here, Schubert’s Trios in B-flat major and the ‘Notturno’ in E-flat major are joined by the delightful Valses nobles D969, composed for solo piano and heard here in a world premiere recording in this arrangement for trio by Julius Zellner.

These are bold, incisive readings full of youthful ardor. No wilting-violet Schubert here. Ashkenazy, Zukerman and Harrell play with imagination and commitment in both works; there is never a hint of routine, of three virtuosi just going through the motions for the sake of producing a star-studded recording. This has lately become my favored recording of these impoderably and inexhaustibly beautiful trios.

This provides a most welcome sequel to La Gaia Scienza’s splendid account of the E flat Schubert Trio (Winter & Winter, 12/97). On that disc Federica Valli plays a Schantz fortepiano with an extremely pungent range of sonorities; here she exchanges it for an 1827 Conrad Graf instrument that is rather more suave and silvery, though recorded with equal immediacy. Indeed, the recording brings out most vividly the character of all three instruments – listen to the start of the Notturno, where the harp-like piano chords contrast most picturesquely with the grainy tone of the gut-strung strings.

The intense-looking trio of pianist Frank Braley and violin-cello brother duo Renaud and Gautier Capuçon has made a critical splash with innovative performances of standard chamber-music repertory in which they move confidently as a unit despite whatever unorthodoxies they may be propounding. Schubert's pair of trios, filled out with two shorter single movements for piano trio to make two short discs, offers a good introduction to their revisionism. In the Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat major, D. 929, the listener will immediately be struck by the brisk tempo of the opening movmement – although it doesn't go beyond what the tempo marking of Allegro indicates, it's a good deal faster than the languid, lyrical tradition that has grown up around this work and around Schubert in general.

The Guarneri Trio Prague, belongs to the most renowned piano trios in the world of classical music. Founded by Ivan Klanský, Čeněk Pavlík and Marek Jerie, the Trio drew with its artistically spectacluar performances the attention of the international press early in its carreer. The Trio has been playing since 1986 in in the same line-up.