Lalo, Bruch, Mendelssohn Trios – Petrof Piano Tr

Three piano trios, all written before their composers turned thirty — a young man’s genre, and this disc is a case study in juvenile ardor filtered through disparate temperaments. The Petrof Piano Trio, a Czech ensemble whose violinist and pianist happen to be married to each other, plays as though it has nothing to prove and everything to enjoy. That turns out to be exactly the right posture for this repertoire.

Lalo’s Piano Trio No. 1 in C minor, op. 7, opens with the cello alone, murmuring something between a confession and a complaint. Kamil Žvak draws a warm, slightly grainy tone from the instrument’s lower register that sets the emotional temperature for what follows. The debt to Mendelssohn is unmistakable, structurally and harmonically, but Lalo’s voice pokes through in odd, wonderful ways: a turn of melancholy here, a flash of Gallic wit there, turbulence that never quite curdles into gloom. The rendition builds its dramatic head of steam patiently. Nothing rushed, nothing oversold. By the close of the first movement the intensity feels earned rather than manufactured. The Romance drifts along on Martina Schulmeisterová’s unhurried pianism, songlike, almost improvisatory, until a jauntier contrasting theme breaks the reverie without breaking the mood. And the finale’s return to the opening cello recitative — Lalo closing his own circle — lands with a satisfying, slightly wistful symmetry. This is not music one hears often in concert halls. It deserves better, and this account makes as persuasive a case as any I know.

Bruch’s op. 5 trio, composed when he was barely into his twenties, is the discovery here — not that it’s unknown to specialists, but it so rarely gets performed alongside its betters. Three tight movements, saturated with the kind of long-breathed cantabile lines that would later flower in the Violin Concerto No. 1 and the Scottish Fantasy. There’s an odd, appealing thumbprint already present: a certain foursquare solidity married to real lyric generosity. The finale’s stalking theme has genuine muscle, more forceful than one expects given the delicacy preceding it, and the Petrof players dig into it with unexpected grit, bow arm and keyboard both leaning forward, urgency without scramble.

Then Mendelssohn, the only work here that actually lives in the standard repertoire. The D minor trio is one of the composer’s supreme achievements, recorded by everyone from the Beaux Arts Trio to Perlman-Ashkenazy-Harrell in various configurations of starry excess. Against that company the Petrof reading is almost bracingly modest. These are musicians more interested in tranquillo than in barnstorming, and I confess I missed, at moments, the sheer combustive energy that Argerich or the old Cortot-Thibaud-Casals release bring to the outer movements. But there’s a case to be made for restraint too. The slow movement breathes, the Scherzo’s fleetness never feels forced, and the finale does eventually find real fire when the music demands it, the ensemble tightening like a fist.

That ensemble tightness is no accident. Jan Schulmeister, violinist of the Wihan Quartet by day, plays with the instinctive give-and-take of chamber musicians who’ve spent years listening sideways at each other. His marriage to the pianist evidently pays interpretive dividends: phrasing here is negotiated, not merely coordinated. Žvak’s cello sound anchors everything with dark, unforced sonority. The engineering favors clarity and warmth over spotlit brilliance, a sensible choice, given how much of this music depends on inner balance rather than star turns.

Not a disc to displace your Mendelssohn trio of choice, if you already have a favorite. But as an anthology illuminating what three gifted young men were up to in the mid-nineteenth century, all still finding their footing under Mendelssohn’s long shadow, it’s genuinely rewarding: intelligently played, handsomely recorded, and worth any chamber music lover’s attention.