Beethoven: Ghost Trio – Kempff, Szeryng, Fournier

Some recordings arrive trailing so much legend that a reviewer approaches them the way one approaches an old, famous house — half expecting the furniture to have been rearranged by memory rather than fact. The Kempff-Szeryng-Fournier Beethoven, newly reissued by Australian Eloquence, is one of those. Three men who by rights should never have blended so well — an organist’s touch, a Franco-Belgian bow arm, and Szeryng’s curiously itinerant style, which started under Flesch in Berlin and ended up sounding half-French in its inflections — somehow found, in the mid-1960s, a shared language. That in itself is worth remarking on. Chamber music is a marriage, and this was a marriage of convenience that turned, at least some of the time, into something like real intimacy.

The Ghost Trio, op. 70 no. 1, is where that intimacy shows most. Kempff opens with the kind of trenchant articulation that reminds you he trained in Potsdam under Barth, a pedagogue steeped in the old Prussian severity — no wallowing allowed. His left hand finds the harmonic undertow of the first movement and just keeps pulling; Fournier and Szeryng ride it rather than fight it. There is one strange patch of playing from Szeryng early on — a wobble of vibrato so uncharacteristic, so unlike the poised, sometimes chilly violinist we know from his Bach and Brahms, that at first I assumed a splice error. He repeats the gesture. So it’s meant. I still don’t like it much.

The slow movement is the reason to own this disc. That famous Largo assai, with its almost Gothic tremolandi and hushed, groping harmonies — the “spectral wanderings,” as annotator Carl Rosman nicely puts it — receives playing of real interior stillness. Fournier’s tone thins to a whisper without losing focus; Szeryng matches him in a kind of aristocratic understatement that never once tips into preciousness. Kempff’s pianism underneath is barely there and yet holds the whole edifice up, the way a good foundation should never be noticed. The finale snaps back into daylight, chipper, unbuttoned, technically immaculate — three players clearly enjoying themselves after all that shadow.

Would that the Archduke were its equal.

It isn’t, and I say this with real reluctance, because on paper — on paper! — this ought to be one of the great recordings of Beethoven’s supreme piano trio. Instead the first movement never quite catches fire. The playing is beautifully turned, the tone gorgeous in that slightly upholstered 1960s DG way, but the engagement feels rented rather than owned. Phrases arrive, are attended to, and depart without leaving much trace. Beethoven’s opening theme, that long unhurried unfolding in E-flat major, wants a sense of spaciousness that comes from inner conviction, not merely from a slow tempo — and here it just sits.

The slow movement, marked Andante cantabile, suffers worse. Fournier’s staccato exchanges with Szeryng sound mannered, over-etched, as if the phrasing had been ironed rather than breathed. Szeryng, for his part, is technically beyond reproach and expressively almost absent — the faceless quality that occasionally dogged even his best work. And the finale, taken at a tempo so deliberate it practically stalls at the barlines, does illuminate Beethoven’s harmonic mischief-making but at the cost of momentum; the movement fractures into episodes rather than accumulating into an argument. Kempff, usually so aristocratic a colorist, turns oddly percussive and occasionally just loud — I don’t think the engineers are entirely to blame. The final pages are simply thrown away, tossed off rather than capped.

Compare this with the old Kogan-Rostropovich-Gilels version, or with Rubinstein-Heifetz-Feuermann from the 1940s, or, for modern ears, the visceral unanimity of the Beaux Arts Trio in their prime — and this Archduke feels underpowered, a great cathedral lit by table lamps.

So: acquire this disc for the Ghost, whose slow movement alone justifies the modest Eloquence price, and regard the Archduke as a historical document rather than a first choice. Even great artists, working together with evident affection and technical mastery, do not always locate the same room in a piece on the same afternoon. Here they found it once. Not twice.