Veronika Rädler Violin; Tatu Kauppinen Cello; Francesco Maccarrone Piano. Haydn Trio in E flat major Hob. XV:29; Rebecca Clarke, Trio for violin, violoncello and piano; Bright ShengFour Movements for Piano Trio; Brahms, Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor op. 101
I decided to spend a day and two nights in Hamburg, coming back from my son’s wedding in Sweden. I had never visited the city and wanted particularly to see the Elbphilharmonie. Though there was nothing on in the Grosse Saal, the smaller hall had a chamber music concert, which I booked a ticket for. After a day wandering around Hamburg, with a pleasant time at the Art Gallery, I went on the U-bahn to as near as I could get to the Philharmonie and had a very windy walk through the spruced-up wharves – like Salford’s Media City on a much larger scale. The Philharmonie is a massive building, boat-like in shape. I suspect you get the best view of it from a distance. The lower bits are I think a hotel and car park, so you have to go up a long escalator and several sets of stairs to get to the concert hall area. There are lots of viewing platforms and places to eat and drink at the top and crowds of Hamburg people and tourists just seemed to be there for the view.
Within the concert hall itself I couldn’t quite work out what was going on – despite its being not a big-name group of musicians, there were lots of young people, whoops for the performers, and, after the Haydn first movement, applause (how the Wigmore Hall audience would shudder). There was lots of general audience enthusiasm throughout. 6 young people presented flowers to the trio at the end. Anyway, whatever the occasion, it made for a good atmosphere.
This was an interestingly contrasted programme, with at least three pieces using some form pf ‘national’ musical inspiration. The Haydn piece sounded as though it was one of his works nearer to Beethoven than Rococo – and indeed, on looking it up, I found it was a late-ish one, published in 1797. Some early mysterious moments in the first movement, the enigmatic and brief slow movement, all contributed to this feeling, but then there was also a cheerful landler-based last movement. The Rebecca Clarke piece was an interesting choice for a German audience and non-British trio of musicians. Even for its time it’s a conservative piece (1923) . There are quite strong elements of Vaughan Williams in the piece – both the Tallis Fantasia of RVW and some of the more disturbing sounds from his works of the 1930s. But it has a lot of coherence on its own terms, some memorable melodies, and a sense of progression and narrative. The trio gave a deeply felt performance and in many ways this was the highlight of the concert. The Bright Sheng piece I didn’t really warm to – it used a mix of Chinese-sounding harmonies and sounds, and Western ones. The 4 movements seemed insufficiently varied.
The Brahms piece is a strange work – tense and with a sense of unease in nearly all its movements, and often compulsively rhythmically complex. Even the third, slow, movement, which sounds at its beginning as though it will turn into a classic melancholy wistful piece of Brahms, somehow becomes something darker and more intense. The first and last movements have those characteristic Brahmsian striding themes but, again, somehow, they seemed foreshortened, turned away from. So…..a complex work and I don’t really know how well the trio played it. The coda of the last movement sounded a bit soggy and lame in this reading. Anyway, much, slightly inexplicable, cheering st the end……
John's musical journey 