Beethoven and Schubert Trios – The Castle Trio

There is a particular sound old Grafs make when the dampers lift — a kind of exhaled sigh just under the tone. Lambert Orkis, playing a 1984 replica of one, lets you hear it all through this two-disc Virgin Veritas set. Whether you find that sigh beguiling or merely distracting will tell you a good deal about your tolerance for period reading generally, and about how you will respond to the Castle Trio’s account of the Archduke.

I confess mixed feelings, which is not the same as reservations about the musicianship. Marilyn McDonald plays a Guarneri violin built in 1670, a century before Beethoven was born, and Kenneth Slowik draws on a Testore cello roughly contemporary with it. Neither instrument is “authentic” to the 1811 trio in any narrow sense. The point is timbre, not chronology, and the timbre is lean, transparent, almost combustible at climaxes. Vibrato is used sparingly, as seasoning rather than as the sauce itself. The ensemble blend that results has real virtues: you hear inner voices Beethoven buried under decades of Steinway sonority, hear the cello’s tenor register singing rather than merely supporting.

The opening of the Archduke is a test case, and not an easy one. Beethoven begins with the piano alone, unaccompanied, laying out the theme in a kind of hushed processional. Orkis, for my ear, softens it slightly, indulges a touch of expressive give where the music wants steadiness, forward tread, inevitability. It happens again at the second subject, also given to keyboard alone. Small thing. But the Archduke survives on the tension between Beethoven’s probing, halting construction of ideas — that famous stop-and-start rhetoric of his first-movement expositions — and a bass-level pulse that must never actually falter. Take away the pulse and the probing becomes merely tentative.

Once past that hurdle, the performance opens up beautifully. The scherzo has real wit, the trio’s imitative counterpoint tossed between instruments like a private joke among old friends. The slow movement, that long-breathed hymn in D major, one of Beethoven’s great arias without words, unfolds with unforced dignity. Slowik in particular phrases with a singer’s sense of where the line wants to breathe.

Filling out the discs are shrewd choices. The op. 44 Variations, an early and not especially deep piece, gets an unpretentious, good-humored reading, useful mostly for what it tells us about the young Beethoven’s Viennese salon manners. The Kakadu Variations, op. 121a, based on a trifling tune from a forgotten singspiel, is more interesting than its pedigree suggests. Beethoven is at his most puckish here, and the piece is played with evident relish, Orkis relaxing into exactly the kind of rhythmic play that eluded him at the start of the Archduke.

Schubert’s E-flat Trio, op. 100, is the real discovery of this set, or ought to be. It’s a work too often left in the shadow of its B-flat sibling, and wrongly so. That opening unison, all four bar-lines of it hammered out like a proclamation, comes off with real snap here. The andante con moto, built on the famous cello tune that Kubrick later borrowed for Barry Lyndon, unfolds with a plainness that avoids the treacle some modern-instrument trios pour over it. Slowik’s tone, thinner and more vocal than a modern cellist’s, suits the melody’s slightly melancholy, slightly Nordic character. Legend has it Schubert borrowed the tune from a Swedish folk song, and there is something folk-like, unshowy, in this reading of it.

The Sonatensatz, an early single-movement torso from 1812, is a lesser piece well played. Agreeable filler rather than revelation.

Recorded across three sessions and two continents between 1989 and 1991, the sound is warm without being airless. The fortepiano is never allowed to clang the way some engineers let these instruments clang. Does this displace the great modern-instrument versions — Istomin-Stern-Rose, the Beaux Arts, or more recently the Florestan Trio’s beautifully turned Hyperion cycle? Not entirely. Something is inevitably lost in weight and sheer visceral power, particularly in the Archduke‘s outer movements. But something is gained too: a transparency and wit that modern trios sometimes bury under too much luxury of sound.

Recommended, then, with genuine enthusiasm, and one small caveat about those opening bars, which nags at me still, though it does not spoil the two hours of civilized, illuminating music-making that follow.