Saturday, August 31, 2024
Royal Albert Hall, London
Early-evening chamber music in a vast venue. Radio listeners were placed close to the action. Brahms’s C-major Trio (replacing Shai Wosner’s transcription of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony) opened the recital, melodically ear-catching, interpretatively arresting, the bond between the musicians carrying the music forward with time-honoured togetherness – heroic and intimate, revealing pertinent contrasts of mood and dynamics, a scurrying Scherzo and generous Trio (third movement) and a Finale sure of its direction. Emanuel Ax was a master of poise, and if the string-players were not always the last word regarding spot-on intonation or sustaining full tone in high registers, the musicians’ ten-year association illuminated the music with experience and camaraderie. The ‘Archduke’ (Beethoven’s Opus 97) was spaciously laid out, lively too, with unvarnished honesty, delicate, songful and dancing, the greatest depth left to the slow movement, with a sense of arrival assigned to the Finale and its coda, easeful collaboration evident throughout. As encores, the slow movement of Schubert’s B-flat Trio (D898), poignant, played in memoriam Rosemary Gent, a Proms administrator, then John Williams’s music for Schindler’s List (Spielberg) arranged for this group by the composer.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022cl2