Photo Credit: Jennifer Brindley
There is no shortage of chamber music in Milwaukee, and a high-profile group began its season last week. Prometheus Trio, one of the performing groups in residence at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, recently gave an interesting program of two curiosities and a cornerstone.
This ensemble is comprised of Margot Schwartz (violin), Scott Tisdel (cello) and Stefanie Jacob (piano). I’ve always admired the sense of a curator’s exploration of literature that the Prometheus Trio steadily displays in its concerts. I’d never heard Claude Debussy’s Piano Trio in G Major, composed at age 18. One can’t expect the teenaged Debussy to have found his mature style as a composer. This four-movement work is drenched in pretty melodies that sound like other French music of the 1880s. It’s lightweight, pleasant stuff without much depth but without pretension. I’m glad to have had the chance to hear it well played.
Few people are familiar with the work of Swiss composer Frank Martin (1890-1974). His Trio sur des mélodies populaires irlandaises (Trio on Irish Folk Melodies) is a sort of art music mash-up of familiar Celtic styles. Some exoticism creeps in at times which doesn’t sound particularly Irish, but nevermind that. It’s an imaginative, fun ride, from delicate rhythmic play in the second movement to a jig in the finale that wouldn’t be out of place at a pub, featuring Schwartz as a passionate fiddler.
After intermission, the concert headed into the main course: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 97, nicknamed the “Archduke Trio” due to the dedication to the composer’s patron. Here is a mid-career masterpiece of the genre with an upbeat spirit, though a few shadows briefly cloud the sunshine. I love the murmuring broodiness that interrupts the second movement. The third movement, the standout of the four movements, begins with chorale-like nobility before a series of inventive variations.
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It seems that piano trios are often most challenging to the pianist. Jacob rose to the occasion with nimble fingers, vivid musicality and without being overwhelming—the latter always a danger for the balance between instruments in such an intimate space.
