Beethoven Piano Trio in C minor – Trio Parnassus

Some ensembles play Beethoven as if apologizing for him. The Trio Parnassus does not belong to that church.

I have been following this German group’s traversal of the complete piano trios for Dabringhaus und Grimm with a mixture of pleasure and mild impatience — pleasure at the playing, impatience because each new installment makes you wait for the next. This latest disc, built around the C minor Trio, op. 1, no. 3, confirms what the first two volumes only promised: here is a group that understands Beethoven’s early chamber music not as apprentice work awaiting the “real” Beethoven of the middle quartets, but as something already fully alive, already dangerous.

The C minor is the one Haydn reportedly warned the young composer not to publish, too radical, too much itself. Beethoven, characteristically, ignored the advice. It is his key, after all, the one he would return to for the Fifth Symphony, the Coriolan Overture, the last piano sonata. Even here, in a twenty-something’s first published opus, you can hear him testing its darker registers. The Trio Parnassus catches this immediately: the opening bars, marked for quiet unison statement, arrive not as throat-clearing but as something coiled, waiting. Wolfgang Metzger’s violin and Michael Groß’s cello lean into the phrase with a kind of held breath, and by the time the development section starts churning, trading fragments, building tension through sheer contrapuntal insistence, you understand why this trio unsettled Haydn’s ears. The interpretation never overplays its hand. Dynamics swell and recede with real shape, not just volume changes for their own sake.

The Menuetto, so marked, fools nobody. This is no drawing-room dance; it’s Beethoven wearing a minuet as disguise, and the group plays it with an undercurrent of unease: light footed, yes, but with sharp accents that keep pulling against the three-four lilt. Then the finale detonates. Launched, as I’ve heard it aptly described, like a rocket. And the ensemble’s ensemble-work (forgive the near-tautology) is immaculate at speed, nothing blurred, every entrance crisp against Katharina Troe’s piano, which never once buries the strings despite Beethoven’s sometimes thick keyboard writing.

But it’s the second movement, Andante cantabile con Variazioni, where this group really shows what it’s made of. Nine variations, each a different lens turned on a simple theme, and the Trio Parnassus refuses to let any two of them sound alike. There’s real wit in the shifts of texture, real tenderness in the slower variants. The engineering deserves credit too: DG’s sister label has captured the pizzicato passages with a startling immediacy, plucked strings that snap rather than thud, the kind of detail that too many studio recordings smear into mush.

Pairing the C minor Trio with the two great sets of variations, the Fourteen Variations in E-flat, op. 44, and the so-called Kakadu Variations, op. 121a, was a smart piece of programming, not just filler logic. Both works confirm how central the variation form was to Beethoven’s imagination long before the Diabelli Variations turned it into something monumental. The op. 44 set, built on a forgotten aria from Dittersdorf’s comic operetta Das rote Käppchen, gets a wonderfully dry, detached statement of theme, almost comic in its understatement, before opening into contrasts of real feeling. The minor-mode variation, where Groß’s cello sings out with unforced warmth, is one of the loveliest three minutes on the disc.

The Kakadu Variations are the more substantial achievement, obviously: a mature work (1816) looking back playfully at a popular song (“Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu,” from Wenzel Müller’s Die Schwestern von Prag) while treating it with the structural seriousness Beethoven reserved for his most personal statements. That opening Adagio introduction, dark and searching, tells you immediately this isn’t going to be mere frivolity dressed up in variation clothing. The Trio Parnassus takes the hint. Ensemble in the presto tenth variation is razor-tight, no scrambling, no smudged runs, just three musicians locking into a single rhythmic pulse at speed, which is harder than it sounds and rarer than it should be.

Do we need another Beethoven trio cycle? The Beaux Arts have their devotees, the Florestan Trio their partisans, and older listeners still swear by the Suk-Katchen-Starker set. But the Trio Parnassus brings something distinct: an unforced naturalness, a refusal to inflate these works into something they’re not, paired with genuine interpretive intelligence. This is chamber music making of a high order. Volume 4, whenever it arrives, will not be ignored on my watch.