From the youthful innocence of Beethoven through to the rich full-bodied textures of late Brahms with an exciting intermediate excursion to the sound world of the ‘father of Russian music’, Mikhail Glinka, the Meryon Trio took its Merriman Music School audience for an energetic European musical journey on a balmy summer evening (May 21^st) at Cranleigh. Indeed, it was a very rare opportunity to hear three examples of just a handful of works ever composed for such a combination of instruments, which permitted a fascinating discovery of fresh and colourful sonorities in an apposite venue for the intimacy of chamber music.

 

The programme opened with Ludwig van Beethoven’s Trio in B flat, a work composed at the tender age of twenty-seven when the composer was a pupil of Josef Haydn. The three-movement composition has a decidedly Mozartian elegance, particularly in the first movement, though it is decked with some extremely daring modulations – an obvious harbinger of Beethoven’s more mature style which was already beginning to emerge. Following the positive vigour of the opening movement, cellist Jitka Vlašanková gave a particularly stirring account of the powerful, soaring cantabile melody at the opening of the ‘Adagio’ movement, with an especially poignant emotional climax as she reached the top of the phrase on an ethereal treble C.   Clarinettist Angus Meryon gave a fittingly lilting rendition of the same melody which followed, creating an involved dialogue with the ’cello, and shaped the melody with beautiful intensity, complemented by a positive lilt in the semi-staccato figures. Pianist Richard Saxel supplemented this with youthfully energetic playing of the rippling piano solo section before consummately leading the audience into the darkness of the tonic minor with an appropriately brooding accompanying sextuplet pattern against the descending melody. The third, Theme and Variations, movement was startling in its variety and exhibition of sheer variety of technical skill. From the mellifluous canon of the second variation to the rhythmically unsettled bars in the final variation, the genuine sense of rhetorical dialogue and variety of musical colour from all three players was arresting.   

Similarly, Glinka’s forthright Trio Pathétique in D Minor, composed in 1832, was performed with poise and the driving rhythmical complexities and contrasting elegant simplicity of flowing melodic lines united to provide a beautifully stylistic performance of this little-known work. The wonderfully lyrical first theme of the first movement, in which the clarinet’s rising sixth was executed with an admirably warm crescendo was complemented by the somewhat unanticipated humour of the scherzo. Here, Richard Saxel communicated the whimsical nature of the virtuosic piano writing with playful lightness whilst the other two players shared their enjoyment of the dramatic dynamic contrasts of their more slow-moving parts.

 

Johannes Brahms’s Trio in A minor, composed a mere six years before his death and six years after his dark fourth, and final, symphony shows the composer at his height of melodic, harmonic and rhythmical versatility. From the monophonic simplicity of the opening cello melody to the pompous and brash piano writing just a few bars later, alongside the clarinet’s capricious dialogue with the ’cello later in the same movement, the Merriman Music School audience was visibly drawn into the rhythmic vitality which the ensemble lent to the work. The audience also observed the players enjoying the challenge of the numerous cleverly written syncopated passages in which the ostensible simplicity of the ‘Alla Breve’ time signature is pushed to its limits in the way only a composer of the skill of Brahms could execute with such positive conviction. The lilting third movement, which recalls the rhythmical complexity of the composer’s second symphony, was given a particularly fine performance in which the dancing nuances of quickly moving triple time flowed interruptedly in the opening section whilst the frequent hemiolaic interjections recalled the youthful Beethovenian energy which opened the programme. The evening rounded off with the tremendously exciting final, ‘Allegro’, movement which alternates in an effortless manner between simple duple and compound duple time, lending a strong sense of unpredictability. As the dynamic increased towards this final movement’s conclusion, the ensemble took its audience close to the dawn of the twentieth century by exhibiting a worthily consummate sense of ensemble, dialogue, energy, lyricism and, above all, technical skill in a work which, in many ways, sums up all the extraordinarily opulent attributes of nineteenth-century chamber music.  

 

TPM