Piano Trio in E flat major WoO 38 (1791) [14:43]
Piano Trio in C minor Op.1 No.3 (1793) [29:34]
Piano Trio in E flat major Op.70 No.2 (1808) [32:20]
Gould Piano Trio (Lucy Gould (violin), Alice Neary (cello), Benjamin Frith (piano))
rec. live, 7 December 2011, St George’s, Brandon Hill, Bristol
SOMM SOMMCD0120 [75:51]
There is a moment in the second movement of the Op. 1, No. 3 Trio — Beethoven marked it Andante cantabile, a set of variations on a theme that floats somewhere between a Lutheran chorale and a lullaby — when the three players seem to breathe together so completely that you forget you’re listening to a album at all. The Gould Piano Trio achieves this in their live St. George’s, Bristol rendition, and it’s not a small thing. It’s actually rather rare.
Start with the historical stakes. Beethoven was twenty-three when he wrote this, recently arrived in Vienna, still officially a student of Haydn — who, in one of music history’s more puzzling acts of mentorship, advised him not to publish it. Haydn was wrong. The Op. 1, No. 3 is the most adventurous of the three trios in the set, the one in C minor, the key Beethoven would return to again and again when he wanted to mean business. It is already unmistakably his, the forward harmonic lurch in the first movement, the way the cello keeps insisting on things the piano would rather glide past.
The Goulds understand all of this.
What’s striking about their playing is the equality of voice — not enforced democracy, but genuine conversation. Pianist Benjamin Frith never colonizes the texture the way some pianists do in this repertoire, where the instrument can easily become a tyrant. The strings push back when they need to. The Andante cantabile in particular has an onward motion that keeps the variations from pooling into sentiment; you feel the pulse even through the most lyrical elaborations, like a current beneath still water.
Competing versions? There are plenty. The old Beaux Arts recordings — particularly their second traversal of the complete trios from the late 1980s — remain the touchstone for many listeners, and with reason: Pressler’s singing tone and the ensemble’s long shared history gave those performances a kind of inevitability. The Florestan Trio’s Hyperion cycle was sharper-edged, more argumentative. The Gould’s approach falls somewhere between these poles, warmer than the Florestans, more alert to surprise than the Beaux Arts at their most settled.
Then there is the Op. 70, No. 2.
Less famous than its companion — the Ghost Trio, with that extraordinary slow movement, went into Volume One — the Op. 70, No. 2 in E-flat has always had to make its case more quietly. It was written in the same white heat that produced the three Razumovsky Quartets, and you can feel that pressure in the finale, which drives with a kind of controlled ferocity. What’s less often noted is how deliberately the work looks backward — toward Haydn, toward Mozart’s late E-flat Piano Trio — even as it keeps pressing on the edges of what a piano trio can be made to carry. The second movement’s triple-meter song, with those shadows of the Choral Fantasy flickering through, is among the most formally inventive things Beethoven wrote in this period.
The Gould’s finale is genuinely commanding. There’s a moment — the false recap, where the music seems about to settle and then doesn’t — where you can hear the audience in Bristol catching its collective breath. Live recording has its risks, but this one earns its applause.
Not every ensemble could pull off both these works on a single program without one of them feeling shortchanged. The Gould does not shortchange either. This is first-rank Beethoven, full stop.
