There is a wonderful and definitive new album of the two Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) piano trios that I can’t let you miss. Mendelssohn: Piano Trios is a recording by a super-trio of great international soloists: Joshua Bell (violin), Steven Isserlis (cello) and Jeremy Denk (piano) – following their live performances on tour together last year. If you know these pieces, I promise you this will be the best version you’ve heard. If you don’t, I urge you to seek them out and play them loud in your headphones. Mendelssohn is sometimes underrated by the general listener and these are two beautiful, involving and approachable gems.
Piano trios – piano, cello, violin – are well worth discovering if you’re not familiar with them. They’re my favourite chamber form because neither composer nor musician can hide, and you hear the three great instruments in intimate note-by-note colloquy. Everything the composer has is there on the line – no excuses, no feigning – and you can clearly hear their particular sound-world and musical ideas as they unfold. The musicians likewise step forward and play without the parley and smudge of the orchestra. And they really do play for each other in the piano trio. There’s none of the self-involvement and audience-distancing that can happen in a solo performance; each instrumentalist must listen to the other two for fear of letting them down, and this three-way reciprocity pulls the best from players – diminishing ego, furthering musical fellowship. In this way, the trio offers the audience direct access to what music-making at its best should be – its kinesis, its interplay, its conversational closeness, its resonance in the sternum. More than any other form, the piano trio invites us in.
Mendelssohn wrote two of the very greatest. The first, in D minor, was composed in 1839 when he was 30; the second, in C minor, in 1845 when he was 36, two years before he died in Leipzig. He was born in Hamburg and spent most of his life in Germany but travelled extensively in the UK and was well loved here. Indeed, he may be best remembered in Britain for his Hebrides Overture, the Scottish Symphony or his incidental music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But these two piano trios, while less well-known, are beloved of musicians, trio enthusiasts and Mendelssohn devotees alike. When you first hear them, they often take a hold like a month-long fever. Both are in four movements. Both deploy an inventive and dynamic sense of rhythm. Both have moments of soaring transport. Both have breath-taking passages of raw beauty. Both are fiendish to play – especially for the piano. Both are full of subtlety and wit and pass through a dozen different moods. Both twine and retwine the three instruments in ever more involving ways. Both have moments of Bach-like beauty amid the crazy cadenzas and sweeping arpeggios. I once recommended the C minor to a non-classical-music friend for their jog; they came back 30 minutes later – eyes lit up, face aglow – saying that not only was it the best run of their lives but they finally understood what classical music was all about.
That makes this recording so special? The simplest answer is that all three musicians are such mighty and intelligent artists. Denk has the hardest job – on piano. A translation of the instructions for some of the movements of the C minor, for example, gives the nature of the game away: Allegro energico e con fuoco (fast, energetic and with fire); Molto allegro quasi presto or (very fast and heading towards even faster); Allegro appassionato (lively, passionate, intense). As Isserlis tells me: “The absolute virtuosity is in the piano part.” But Denk is such a subtle and deft pianist that he makes his sound seem effortless. His playing is never at the expense of character or the clarity of his runs, but it is offered up so smoothly that it’s easy to miss – like breezing past a great master in the gallery because, well, the painting is so perfect there’s nothing further to say. And yet, one of this recording’s main secrets is that Denk is also endlessly generous – to his fellow musicians, to his audience, to his listeners. If you ever get the chance to see him live, he is one of the greatest communicators of music around. You feel six times more intelligent simply by listening to him, like maybe you, too, understand what is going on with the score.
This is not to understate the musical gifts of the other two. Isserlis has a strong claim to the best cello sound in the world at the moment. On this recording, he is soulful and sonorous as ever, but also witty, warm, brooding, agile, moving – often several of these things at the same time. Meanwhile, people who love classical music will already know that Joshua Bell is for many (me included) the greatest all-round violinist in the world. But even so, and having heard him many times live, I find the shimmering elegance of his sound a complete mystery. None of it seems explicable. The same on this recording. The exuberance, the sadness, the gentleness, the defiance, the lightness, the sheer charm.
Listen to the second movement of the D minor, for example. (Start here if you have no time.) Denk’s impeccable piano introduces us to the main theme unaccompanied by the two strings. But notice how the cello and violin have been hiding in the coulisse, and how Bell and Isserlis enter together all the more exquisitely for our momentarily having forgotten them. Or listen to the unusual string slide in the first movement of the C minor at around eight minutes – in the midst of one of the most haunting passages, and between all the fiendish allegro stampedes. It is so beautiful that you know this will be the must-have Mendelssohn trio that replaces the great Beaux Arts Trio, the Borodin Quartet, even the 1990s recording by Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, and Daniel Barenboim.
Isserlis tells me that “the two scherzos are the most challenging sections for the cello… especially getting the right cantabile”. And it is true, the two scherzos are ferocious finger-feuds for all three musicians – and amazing to witness live. But it is in the two fourth movements, the finales, that Mendelssohn brings everything together. In the D minor, for example, he offers us flying joust, lyrical splendour, rhythmic exuberance, soaring violin, resonant cello and dancing piano. Then as if from nowhere, he introduces a chorale (intoned by the piano and so delicately taken up by Bell’s violin) and we feel the additional introduction of some (Bach-like) Lutheran hymnal gravitas. Mendelssohn is a Romantic, though, and when he brings this chorale back at the end, we realise that he has somehow synthesised the old baroque idea of the sacred-as-sublime with a new vision of the sanctity of the individual human experience.
It’s here in the fourth movements that you realise why this recording is so good. Sure, there’s technical majesty, but there are so many micro-components of talent, intelligence, sensitivity, facility, interpretation and timing that go into recording a great piece. This one has it all.
More than even this, though, is that rarest and most elusive quality to the recording: it sounds fresh. The musicians are playing as if every bar is new to them and this sense of discovery is passed on to us. I know these pieces well and yet they sound entirely new to me. There’s a great freedom here. There is also great joy. “He is a very joyful composer,” Isserlis explains, “and both of these Mendelssohn trios end gloriously in the major.” Beauty, freedom, joy. As I say – two gems. Go and seek them out.
“Mendelssohn: Piano Trios” is out now on Sony Classical
[See also: The paradoxes of Frank Auerbach]
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