Friday October 12, 2018 11:21 PM Concert review: Trio makes triumphant return to Reading
The McDonald-Cho-Rose Trio opens the 66th season of the Friends of Chamber Music season at the WCR Center for the Arts.
Written by By Susan L. Pena
The McDonald-Cho-Rosen Trio returned to the WCR Center for the Arts after three years on Friday night to open the 66th season of the Friends of Chamber Music of Reading.
Pianist Robert McDonald, violinist Catherine Cho and cellist Marcy Rosen - three superb musicians and sought-after teachers who also happen to be friends - gave a concert that epitomized everything I love about chamber music.
A perfect chamber concert should, in addition to presenting the best repertoire, be exactly like an intimate theater piece, with eloquent soliloquies, deep conversations and a good portion of playful frolicking among the musicians.
This concert was as close to perfect as you could have, showcasing three of the most beautiful works for piano trio: Beethoven's Sonata No. 4 for Violin and Piano in A minor; Maurice Ravel's rarely heard Sonata for Violin and Cello; and Antonin Dvorak's massive, orchestral Piano Trio No. 3 in F minor, which put him on the map as a chamber music composer.
The Beethoven Sonata, composed in 1801, gave Cho and McDonald an opportunity to give an intense collaborative performance of a piece that has passages of drama as well as grace. Cho's distinctive, muscular and expressive tone blended well with McDonald's huge range of dynamics and touch on the piano.
Rosen said few pieces are written for just cello and violin, but Ravel was inspired, in 1914, to write this after hearing Zoltan Kodaly duo, composed that same year.
The tremulous opening for the two instruments gave way to Rosen's cello plunging downward to the richest sound anyone could make. Cho and Rosen created a nocturnal atmosphere with this first movement, that was obliterated by the second.
Here, fat pizzicatos abounded on both instruments, alternating with furious passages - a bit grotesque and droll, with many surprises. But some of this music had the delicacy of an ancient recording.
Rosen's elegiac, otherworldly solo introducing the slow movement set an introspective tone, into which Cho wove countermelodies in a few minutes of utter bliss.
A foot-stomping dance ended the Sonata - an intriguing, complex, mysterious piece that displayed an unexpected variety of tone and color.
There were many highlights in the trio's performance of Dvorak's 1883 piece, which, in their hands, sounded like a full orchestra. Cho's tone was almost as powerful as Rosen's in the rhapsodic first movement; the three evoked magic in the scherzo-like second movement, with its cascading piano trills; Rosen's deep, sorrowful solo in the Adagio was balanced by Cho's melting love song.
And the finale, based on the Czech Furiant dance, was a blur of swirling melodies, abrupt accents and sweet songs that emerged and then were swept back into the circle.
Contact Susan L. Pena:
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