Mendelssohn Piano Trios – Jugovic, Bader-Kubizek,

There is something almost indecent about how good Felix Mendelssohn was at eleven years old, and this new two-disc survey of the complete Mendelssohn piano trios — his and his sister’s — puts that precocity right up front, before the famous things, as a kind of dare.

The D minor trio for piano, violin, and viola that opens the first disc is a juvenile document, yes, but not a quaint one. Mendelssohn was eleven. Eleven, and already writing a scherzo that darts by in under two minutes with the wit of a composer three times his age, already absorbing counterpoint the way other children absorb scales. You hear Bach somewhere in the slow movement’s imitative weave — no surprise, given that this was the household where Zelter was piling the Well-Tempered Clavier onto a boy who would grow up to revive the St. Matthew Passion before he was out of his twenties. The piece doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. But it is, by any reasonable standard, astonishing, and it has had wretched luck on disc; this is only the third album I know of. Hrvoje Jugovic, Maria Bader-Kubizek, and Silvia Schweinberger play it without condescension, which is exactly right — the surest way to kill juvenilia is to perform it as juvenilia.

Then come the two numbered trios, in D minor (op. 49) and C minor (op. 66), and here the shift in stature is total. The D minor trio is one of the great chamber works of the nineteenth century — Schumann thought so too, calling Mendelssohn “the Mozart of the nineteenth century” partly on its evidence — and this performance has the sweep and the sheen to argue the case all over again. The slow movement’s songfulness, the scherzo’s quicksilver tread (that Mendelssohnian elfin scurry nobody else ever quite got right, not Schumann, not Brahms) — it’s all here, played with real heat.

op. 66 is the tougher nut. Written in 1845, two years before Mendelssohn’s death, it carries a darker, more contrapuntally knotted weight than its predecessor, and the opening allegro energico e con fuoco in this reading is, frankly, a little short on fuoco — fire promised by the marking but not entirely delivered. I missed a rawer edge in the attack. But the players recover themselves spectacularly: the scherzo flickers with real mischief, and the finale, with its chorale-like apotheosis quoting the old hymn tune “Vor deinem Thron,” builds to a close that had me sitting forward. Best saved for last, as it happens — a trio that takes its time earning your love.

And then — finally, properly — there’s Fanny.

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s D minor trio, op. 11, composed the year of her death in 1847, deserves every bit of the attention her brother’s music has hogged for a century and a half. It’s a dramatic, urgently argued piece, harmonically restless in ways that sometimes out-adventure Felix, and it’s a scandal it took this long after her death for the piece to reach something like standard repertoire. The reading here has real conviction, even if the chosen instrument — a Schweighofer from 1854, reedy and a touch effortful in its upper register — is, to my ear, the least congenial of the four pianos used across these two discs. No matter. Jugovic plays through its limitations rather than around them, and the trio’s dark, turbulent close lands hard.

The conceit of using a different historical instrument for each of the four works is more than a gimmick — it’s genuinely instructive, and the booklet photographs let you see what you’re hearing, a Broadwood from 1838 with a warmth that practically glows through the speakers, fuller and rounder than anything Viennese of the same vintage. Period-instrument Mendelssohn is still a relatively rare commodity next to the mountain of modern-piano recordings — the Beaux Arts Trio’s classic traversal, or more recently the Trio Wanderer — and this set earns its place among them through sheer tonal variety as much as scholarship.

I wanted biographical notes on the players and didn’t get them, which is a small, nagging omission in an otherwise handsomely documented release. But the music-making answers for itself. This is Mendelssohn — both Mendelssohns — played with intelligence, idiomatic warmth, and an evident love for the material that never curdles into reverence. A genuine winner, and right now the single best way to hear this repertoire complete.