Beethoven’s Ghost
Wednesday 6 May
City Recital Hall
Yes, it’s true that the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D major, Op.70 No.1 has caused it to carry the title “The Ghost” for most of its life because of its dark and eerie sound, but that’s only nine minutes out of a 27-minute piece. The rest of it is altogether bright and breezy and the third and final movement positively blows a gale after the eeriness is over. And Musica Viva’s trio of Kristian Winther, violin, Timo-Veikko Valve, cello, and Aura Go, piano make the most of it. It was fun watching them trying not to trip over each other in Beethoven’s scampering finale, where the piano skitters off into a foreign key and the strings are left to bring it back again. All in all great fun and beautifully executed by this seemingly newly constituted trio.
At the other end of the evening came Maurice Ravel’s 1914 Trio, written at the outbreak of the Great War, an event which depressed Ravel greatly, a fact which is clear in this work. This A minor trio is generally considered one of Ravel’s masterpieces and serves well as a bridge between the Romantic era and the 20th century. There’s modernity in it, but still tunefulness, unlike, I fear, the concert’s second offering, a modern commission from Australian composer Melody Eötvös entitled Regnare, a sort of tribute to the Tasmanian Mountain Ash. I freely admit to being the wrong person to review modern music. This form of 21st musical impressionism leaves me cold I’m sorry to say.
The fourth work in the concert was the most impressionistic and the saddest. The French composer Lili Boulanger wrote D’un soir triste (Of a sad evening) on her deathbed, dying some eight weeks after it was finished from tuberculosis. Lili had been ill almost all her life and this work seems to say what’s the point of it all? But then come little uplifting rays of hope. The trio gave it all the delicacy that the work deserves and it was a clever inclusion in the programme.
If you missed the concert in Sydney, the trio will be in Canberra on May 7 at the ANU School of Music, Adelaide Town Hall on May 9, the Melbourne Recital Centre on May 12, and at the Winthrop Hall in Perth on May 14.