Three great soloists do not have to make a good ensemble. Chamber music understanding, tuning intonation, balance between two strings, i.e. violin and violoncello, and the piano, unity of phrasing, stylistic security and much more – all this belongs to a quality piano trio. Otherwise it remains a meeting of certainly illustrious names, in which everyone struggles through on his own, so to speak. That will still be impressive with top players, but hardly in the sense of listening to each other.
On this evening in the Prinzregententheater, however, the violinist Isabelle Faust, the cellist Sol Gabetta and the pianist Alexander Melnikow played Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s C minor Trio and Franz Schubert’s E flat major Trio as a real trio with the greatest mutual attention. The three have been making music together for a long time and have adjusted to each other intensively. Melnikov was not sitting at the usual Steinway, but at a replica of a Pleyel grand piano from 1848, the two string players played wonderful Stradivarius instruments. The effect was impressive: the piano never drowned out the violin and cello, but mingled with them with a warm, intimate sound. It’s also a stringed instrument. The vibrato culture of Faust and Gabetta avoided any obtrusiveness, the virtuosity of the three, for example in the frenzied Mendelssohn Scherzo, took your breath away and for that very reason stayed with the matter at hand.
The three were a rousing event of energy, passion and expressiveness, without wrongly exaggerating Mendelssohn’s dramatic restlessness or getting lost in Schubert’s symphonic expansion of his giant trio in separate actions. Here three phenomenal musicians were found to realize the enormous intensity, melodic intensity and the unique compositional density of the two pieces as carefully as they were brilliant. They thanked the ovations with the 3rd movement from Robert Schumann’s F major trio.