1807 & Friends season finale

Earlier this season I discussed my fondness for Schubert's piano trios and slighted Beethoven's piano trios in passing. Dan Coren took exception to that and specifically mentioned the last entry in the latest 1807 and Friends program: Beethoven's "Archduke" trio.

For me, the great appeal of Schubert's piano trios lies in their emotional depth and the way Schubert exploited the strong contrasts inherent in a trio that combines a keyboard instrument with the highest and lowest voices in the string quartet. I hear those same qualities in the trios composed by Brahms, Ravel and Shostakovich that I have come to love. I don't hear them in Beethoven. That may not be the most profound reason for liking or not liking a piece of music, but in this case it happens to be mine.

Of course every generalization has its flaws. I dissed Haydn's piano trios, too, and I got a large jolt of pleasure out of the cheerful trio for flute, cello and piano that Mimi Stillman and her colleagues played at a recent Dolce Suono concert. Technically that's a piano trio, too. We normally apply the term to a trio for violin, cello and piano, but my Groves-Norton music encyclopedia says it includes all trios for piano and other instruments.

A rare happy Beethoven work

And I definitely should have made an exception for the "Archduke" trio— especially when it receives the kind of performance produced by Nancy Bean, Lloyd Smith and Marcantonio Barone at the end of the Friends' musicale. The "Archduke" trio may not satisfy my appetite for poignancy, but it has charms of its own. The Archduke referred to in the nickname was a close friend of Beethoven's, not just a patron, and the trio is one of Beethoven's happier works.

One of my companions at the concert remarked that the musicians appeared to be having a good time. That probably sums up the overall quality of the performance about as well as anything. It's the judgment I would find most useful if I were reading a review and wondering if I should give 1807 & Friends a try. All three of the pieces on this program seem to have been chosen because the performers enjoy playing them— for all the complex reasons artists enjoy practicing their trade— and they transmitted that benign virus to their audience.

Dvorak's American mood

The opening number presented Nancy Bean with the lightest assignment on the program. Dvorak wrote his Sonatina for Violin and Piano in his "American" mood, and it contains the same mixture of American and Bohemian influences you hear in his New World Symphony.

Bean produced a satisfyingly heartbreaking lament in the haunting middle movement, along with the lively fiddling and finely drawn lines required in the other sections. She seemed less sure of her role in the sections in which the violin essentially accompanies the piano— but that is, after all, a reversal of the normal relationship.

The power of wordless melody

The evening's centerpiece, for me, was Rachmaninoff's Cello Sonata in G Minor. In the hands of Lloyd Smith and Marcantonio Barone, the sonata became a testament to the power of the wordless melody line.

Rachmaninoff called the piece a cello sonata, and that would normally mean the piano plays a subordinate role. But Rachmaninoff couldn't repress the star pianist in his musical personality. You could hear his voice all through the piano part in the opening movement. Rachmaninoff wrote the sonata in the same year he wrote his second piano concerto, and it's a worthy companion to his most popular concerto.

Rachmaninoff gave the cello a feast of melodies, in its best range, in the second movement scherzo and followed that outpouring with a big, swelling example of soulful romanticism in the third movement andante. Smith should have found the whole sonata a joy to play. But those two movements, by themselves, constitute one of the great cello solos.