Prometheus Trio opened a new season last week in the recital hall at Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, one of the city’s performing spaces we perhaps take for granted. This intimate, lovely room is nearly ideal for small ensembles (except for occasional Prospect Avenue traffic noise), and seems akin to the kind of 19th-century salons that were fundamental in the rise of chamber music as a genre. String instruments are especially flattered by the acoustics.
I’ve long admired the taste shown in the programming choices for Prometheus Trio concerts. In the specialized category of piano trios (music composed for violin, cello and piano), the ensemble has explored literature with a connoisseur’s enthusiasm. A good example is the piano trio (Op. 45) of French composer Gabriel Pierné (1863-1937), with whom very few are familiar, including me. His life straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, and consequently, his music mixes the aesthetics of both the late romantic and early modern eras. (In vastly different styles Sergei Rachmaninoff and Giacomo Puccini did the same thing.)
Pierné’s large-scale 45-minute piano trio of 1922 echoes traditions in romantic composers such as César Franck as well as the impressionistic styles of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Though the third movement shows liveliness with a bit of a distant Gallic chill, the overall impression of this substantial, wonderful piece is lushness with a heavy French accent. I kept thinking: If Ravel temperamentally and aesthetically had been more of a romantic he might have written something like this.
Another intriguing curiosity followed: Ludwig van Beethoven’s own arrangement for piano trio of his Symphony No. 2. How interesting it was to hear this familiar music through a different filter. Beethoven deliberately did not retain the original cello or violin lines necessarily from the symphony. This trio version, of course, made something more intimate of the symphony, but it also made something grand of the chamber ensemble.
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Both pieces heavily featured piano, and Stefanie Jacob played these two huge parts very well. Sensitive ensemble playing was a strong suit of the playing of violinist Timothy Klabunde and cellist Scott Tisdel, though occasionally the tuning was not perfect.
