Programs take cues from real life
(An Electrifying Performance)Tim Smith | Music October 16, 2007
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.
The program opened with the C major Trio by Haydn (Hob. XV:27), which found violinist Ulf Schneider, cellist Martin Lohr and pianist Eckart Heiligers articulating with extraordinary clarity, cohesiveness and, in the amusing finale, breathless exuberance. The ensemble tapped deeply into the urgent romanticism of Mendelssohn's C minor Trio, while reserving plenty of lightness and an almost giddy energy for its feathery Scherzo (I'm not sure that movement can be played more brilliantly than it was here).
In Shostakovich's sobering Trio No. 2, there was from each musician a remarkable level of incisiveness (and, given several odd distractions in the audience, of concentration). 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.
