by Stephen Kaye
Piano trios possess a distinctive repertoire with their interpretive milestones. Two of those milestones that were played by Lysander Trio, Sunday, June 16 at Music Mountain in Falls Village, CT: the second Shostakovich (1944) and the first Mendelssohn (1839).
By 1943, the winter had taken its toll on the German invaders; the line had held just outside Leningrad; the Soviet troops were advancing. Descriptions of the concentration camps began to filter into Moscow and the Ural retreat, where artists, composers, and Russia’s art treasures were lodged. Shostakovich, deeply moved, responded in a language he had developed using a trio form that expressed feelings of sympathy, anger, terror, compassion, death, and ultimately, peace. The Lysander was up for it; they excelled in conveying these feelings through these various phases, creating the tension that captivated the Sunday afternoon audience. It was certainly the most passionate version of this trio of the many that this reviewer has heard. Music can wail, weep, shed tears, scream in extremity, expire, express anger, remorse, compassion: all humanity can be reached, a universal lamentation; also a shared sense of responsibility, for we too are involved now, not just as spectators but as active participants in the human experience.
The second half opened with a short and somewhat mysterious work by Avo Part, a contemporary Estonian composer who borrowed the notes of a Mozart adagio and rendered them into his dramatic minimalist language by slowing down time and opening silences. It was effective, but one wondered: why?
The final work was one of the landmarks of the trio literature, Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio #1 in D Minor. The influence was Beethoven; the writing is dense and challenging. Lysander must have played it scores of times. I felt that they overplayed slightly, too assertive, and perhaps in a hurry to wind up the afternoon. It is great music and shouldn’t be rushed.
I enjoyed the violin work of Itmar Zorman and the cello of James Kim. Pianist Liza Stepanova did great in the opening Schumann pieces and in the Shostakovich Trio, but in the Mendelssohn, nuances were blurred. Nonetheless, the afternoon was a triumph of trios. May there be many more!
