Thalassa Piano Trio. Beethoven, Piano Trio Op 70, no 2; Babajamian, Piano Trio in F# minor
As often has been the case over the past few years, I have found myself planning to be at a Wigmore Hall recital – because there’s always something interesting happening there – the night before setting off on the Eurostar the following morning for another European opera/concert trip. The trip this time is to Barcelona – see above for posts next week – but the Wigmore Hal recital by Roddy Williams was a programme that looked very well worthwhile listening to in its own right, and I might have come down for it even if I wasn’t going on to Paris the next morning.
However, this time planning went slightly awry, and the force of Storm Goretti, which closed all railway lines near my home from 6pm on 8/1 to Saturday 10/1, meant that I had to come down a day earlier to London than planned. That had various negative consequences financially, but one pleasant result was being able to go to this lunchtime concert.
I had never been in the Regent Hall before – it is a fine building, run by the Salvation Army with a café and advice centre as well as a large auditorium which the SA use for Sunday worship but which has extremely good acoustics – lots of wood around – and is excellent for recitals, holding maybe 300-400 people. Curiously it is right in the middle of Oxford Street, on the other side of the road from John Lewis.
The Thalassa Trio is multi-national (hence the title – people coming from both sides of the Atlantic) but formed at the RAM. To my surprise I discovered beforehand I only had a recording of the Beethoven ‘Ghost; and ‘Archduke’ piano trios and had never heard the Op 70 no 2 piece before. In 4 movements, it is a very attractive work – with a slow haunting introduction (poco sostenuto) almost offering a glimpse of the world of the late quartets and some very fine broad striding Beethovenian melodies, particularly in the third and fourth movements. The players gave it lots of energy – which is right – though from where I was sitting the violin was occasionally a bit over-powered by the cello. But I enjoyed this enough to listen to it again on Youtube when I got back to my hotel in the afternoon. A nice find!
Arno Babajamian was a completely new name to me – a Soviet-era Armenian composer, a bit younger than Khachaturian, and writing in a variety of styles – popular music, film scores but also ‘serious’ music. He apparently often uses Armenian folk tunes (as a good Soviet composer would have been expected to do). The work is frankly not that interesting – some Rachmaninov touches, occasional hints of Shostakovich. It had a particular problem in knowing when to stop in the first and third movements, where things seemed to judder to an abrupt halt rather than emerging from an organic process. The second movement was lovely, though.
John's musical journey 