Trio Isimsiz
Rubicon RCD1107 77:02 mins
This impressive recording comes from an ensemble that is reaching its maturity in a superb way. Violinist Pablo Hernán Benedí, cellist Edvard Pogossian and pianist Erdem Mısırlıoğlu, who formed their ensemble around 14 years ago at the Guildhall School in London, have been rising slowly but steadily to prominence through some of the most perspicacious young artist programmes around, notably the Young Classical Artists Trust and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. Here they push the boat out with a programme that includes, alongside Brahms’s ever-popular Trio No. 2, the sole Piano Trio by Korngold (who, quite incredibly, wrote it aged 12) and a new work they have commissioned from the Spanish composer Francisco Coll.
There’s an excellent finesse to the group’s playing, which holds their individual contributions and their collective, conversational ensemble work in an ideal balance. In the Korngold, they embrace the youthful composer’s full-blooded language, but never make heavy weather of it; while it is powerfully played, the touch is predominantly sprightly, making the most of the heady stream of melodic ideas.
The Brahms, too, is well calibrated, even well behaved, but still emotionally off the leash and full of high spirits.
The only slight question-mark hangs over the new work by Coll. While ambitious and colourful, setting challenges aplenty to which the trio rises in style, its atonal, spiky, modernist musical language sits perhaps a little awkwardly alongside the honeyed beauties of Brahms and Korngold. I’m not entirely convinced this programme was the best setting for it.
Overall, however, this is a delectable cake on which excellent recorded sound (I’m not at all surprised to see Andrew Keener credited here) is the crisp, bright icing.
