» The Montreal Gazette
Nowhere was their chiselled and sculptured interplay more persuasive than in the poetic Andante or the breathless but reasoned Scherzo. The Mendelssohn concluded an afternoon of refined music making, rewarding as much for its tonal and expressive engagement as for its narrative coherency.
» Wiesbadener Kurier / Wiesbadener Tagblatt
Trio Jean Paul - Rheingau Musik Festival
The violinist Ulf Schneider, the cellist Martin Loehr and the pianist Eckart Heiligers have found a way to make music their native tongue.
» Musical Pointer, London
Trio Jean Paul - Wigmore Hall
This sensational recital, one of our greatest musical experiences of the year, confirmed their world class stature, and its sounds will ring in my ears for a long time.
» The London Times
Trio Jean Paul - Wigmore Hall
Here's an ensemble that really knows how to highlight the rhetorical flourishes and the conversational cut-and-thrust that are the essence of chamber music.
One interrupted cadence in particular was treated like a nagging question-mark that loomed larger and larger as the first movement progressed. In the slow movement, even the silences seemed sublimely chiselled. And the rudely unannounced key-changes in the presto finale - the work's startling excursion into the wild realms of Sturm und Drang - were properly jolting.
To execute these interpretative insights the trio deployed dazzling technical resources. The violinist Ulf Schneider and the cellist Martin Lohr constantly varied their vibrato, period-instrument fashion, while the peachy-toned pianist, Eckart Heiligers, skimmed with pristine virtuosity through page after fiendish page of Haydn's quickfire semiquavers.
» Kieler Nachrichten
Trio Jean Paul - Schleswig-Holstein-Festival
The three musicians do not need to demonstrate an outward "vivacity", they get Brahm's partly exuberant, partly austere and partly intimate music to talk from the inside.. The Trio Jean Paul implants in the listeners' soul what the very young Brahms carried within his heart. It is an irrisistable performance -
» New York Times
Trio Jean Paul - Frick Hall
The luck of the draw has brought me to a lot of trio concerts in recent months but none quite as impressive as the Trio Jean Paul at the Frick Collection on Sunday afternoon. The topic of technique could be brought up and immediately dropped. So comfortable are these three Germans with their instruments that physical ability was quickly assumed and thereafter went unnoticed.
More gratifying was the heartfelt yet scrupulous attention to European music's grammar and vocabulary. In Haydn, Schoenberg and Brahms, the trio - Ulf Schneider, the violinist; Martin Löhr, the cellist; and Eckart Heiligers, the pianist - showed listeners the ways in which harmonic change stretches time and orders phrases, and how silence can be "listened to," creating a tension of its own.
» Baltimore Sun, Baltimore
Speaking of trios, there's one from Germany that may well be setting a new gold standard for technical fluency and expressive impact. Trio Jean Paul gave an electrifying performance Sunday night for the Shriver Hall Concert Series, a performance so rich in character, so full of ideas that I hated for it to end.
Trio Jean Paul, founded in 1991, was named for the pseudonym used at the turn of the 19th century by German writer Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, who wrote that "art is not the bread but the wine of life." By that reckoning, Sunday's concert was a case of the finest Bordeaux.
» Die Zeit
One can play Beethoven certainly quite differently - like for example the 1991-founded, still young trio Jean Paul (Ars Musici 1335). The first bars of the G major trio op 1, No 2 almost give the impression of listening to a period instrument ensemble, so slender and pliable is the musicians' collective sound, so vibrant, ingenious and articulate is their phrasing. Beethoven's piano trio from an almost baroque perspective, as a sometimes intriguingly witty, sometimes touching yet always well thought-out dialogue. The famous citation that in Vienna the young Beethoven received "Mozart's spirit from Haydn's hands", here - and surprisingly no less in the much later dated E-flat major trio op 70, No 2 - it becomes a true ringing legacy.
» The Strad
Trio Jean Paul - Wigmore Hall
...the Trio Jean Paul combined an extraordinary degree of mutual understanding and suavity with an exceptionally developed responsiveness to dramatic and colouristic potential...the audience was rocked by stormily emotional but always cultured playing.
» The Scotsman
Trio Jean Paul - Edinburgh Festival
READING scores, yet seemingly playing by music radar, as if their six hands were part of one organic whole, the German Trio Jean Paul brought an inspiring sense of ensemble coherence to three piano trios.
In the final analysis, that is where Trio Jean Paul's strength lies: if you closed your eyes you were unaware of individual musicians, involved simply in the music itself.
Acclaim
