If God Wrote Music, It Would Sound Like This
J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 03/02/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Strangely enough Mozart's piano trios are not as often featured in the concert programs of touring piano trios as one might expect. I'm not quite sure why this is, but my suspicion is that for many musicians Mozart's music seems too simple, too predictable, not showy enough. Indeed one sometimes imagines, while listening to Mozart, that it is so perfect one could have dreamed it up oneself. Fat chance! This notion is a little like the often expressed view that works by the great Abstract Expressionist painters could have been done by a child. Actually Mozart's piano trios are such delights as this CD and the earlier CD in this series show repeatedly. In the hands of the young Kungsbacka Trio there are many moments of transport, of magic, of ineffable beauty.
The three late trios presented here -- K. 542, 548, 564 -- were written in 1788, late in Mozart's tragically short career, the same period as the great late symphonies, Nos. 39, 40, 41, and the string trio, the so-called Divertimento, K. 563. And they are real gems. Was there ever anyone prior to Mozart who wrote such lovely variation movements? Or such lovely andantes? Or such life-affirming rondos? They are all here in these trios.
The extra music here is the three-movement Piano Trio, K. 442, that is actually a completion of three unrelated Mozartean fragments done sometime after 1798 at the request of Mozart's widow by his friend, Maximilian Stadler. Not surprisingly the incipits of these movements do indeed sound like Mozart, but the workings-out do not. The first movement contains 55 measures written by Mozart; when Stadler's completion starts one immediately senses that the cello part has suddenly become more important than in what had gone before. Much the same is true for the second movement. One can surmise that the reason Mozart did not continue with these two fragments is that he had not given the cello sufficient equal opportunity to participate; when Stadler completed them he increased, artificially, the cello's importance. The third movement sounds more like Mozart and indeed examination of the manuscripts of the fragments shows that he had almost completed the movement before breaking it off.
The Kungsbacka Trio was formed in 1997 and named for the little Swedish city in which they gave their first performance. Its members are the extraordinarily sensitive pianist, Simon Crawford-Phillips, violinist Malin Broman and cellist Jesper Svedberg. One hopes they keep recording for Naxos. Their earlier CD containing earlier Mozart trios Mozart: Piano Trios K. 496 and K. 502; Divertimento in B flat and the one with Schubert's E flat trio Schubert: Piano Trio 2 in E Flat Major are worth hearing.
Scott Morrison"
