Lalo, Bruch and Mendelssohn Piano Trios – Petrof Pi

Some pairings make instant sense on paper and less sense in the ear. This one, oddly, works better than it should.

Lalo has never quite escaped the shadow of his own Symphonie espagnole — a pity, since the chamber music tells a more interesting story about a composer feeling his way toward a voice. The Piano Trio No. 1 in C minor comes from a young man still absorbing Beethoven and early Schumann, not yet the confident colorist of the 1870s and ‘80s. You can hear the seams. The opening movement has a scratchy, agitated energy — squally is not a bad word for it — that never quite resolves into a settled idea, as though Lalo were arguing with himself about which German model to imitate. But the Romance redeems everything: a lullaby of a piano solo, unpretentious, almost naive, handed gently to the violin and then to the cello like something passed hand to hand at a christening. Kamil Žvak’s cello tone here is dusky, unforced, exactly right. The Scherzo dances with real wit. And the finale, launched by a cello solo of surprising gravity, builds a head of steam that the group sustains without forcing the tone, no small feat in a work whose seams show as often as its charms do.

Bruch gets far less attention than he deserves outside of that one violin concerto, the millstone around his posthumous reputation. Everybody plays it; almost nobody plays anything else. The C minor trio, op. 5, is a product of 1859, when Bruch was barely into his twenties and still working in the long shadow of Mendelssohn, a countryman, an idol, dead only a dozen years by then and still the dominant force in German musical life. You hear the debt everywhere: in the singing Andante molto cantabile that opens the piece, noble rather than showy, and in the onward-tumbling energy of the finale. This is not a great work. It is a lovely one, unpretentious, well-made, worth reviving, and the Petrof players treat it with exactly the sort of unforced advocacy it needs, never inflating its ambitions beyond what the music can bear.

Then Mendelssohn himself. The difference in stature is immediate, audible within the first eight bars, really. The D minor trio, op. 49, is one of those rare chamber works recognized as a masterpiece the moment it appeared; Schumann called it the master trio of the age, and time has not much revised that judgment. Robert and Clara both adored it. Ferdinand David, no less, encouraged Mendelssohn to lighten the original piano part into the glittering, Chopin-inflected figuration we know today, proof that even genius benefits from a good editor. The Molto allegro agitato has an urgency here that never curdles into anxiety; pianist Martina Schulmeisterová keeps the triplet figuration liquid rather than pounded, which matters enormously in a work so easily turned into note-spinning. The Andante sings without saccharine indulgence. The scherzo is fleet, mercurial, very much in the tradition of the Midsummer Night’s Dream music. You can practically hear gossamer wings. And the finale has the good sense to build rather than rush.

Comparisons are unavoidable: the Beaux Arts on Philips, the Florestan on Hyperion, more recently the Trio Wanderer. Against that company the Petrof does not eclipse the field so much as hold its own with unfussy conviction. Jan Schulmeister’s violin tone is leaner than some, less overtly sweet than the Beaux Arts’ Isidore Cohen, but there’s an argument for that leanness: it keeps the Mendelssohn from tipping into salon prettiness. Ensemble balance throughout the disc is exemplary, the piano never buried, never dominant, a genuine partnership, which is rarer on disc than one might think.

Nimbus’s engineering is warm without blur, close without claustrophobia. A generous, intelligently planned disc: Lalo and Bruch as illuminating context, Mendelssohn as the reason you’ll return to it.