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Review: Benedetti Elschenbroich Grynyuk Trio

A first-rate piano trio making its debut in Australia concludes the 2018 Musica Viva Season with success.
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The Benedetti Elschenbroich Grynyuk Trio. Supplied.

Undertaking the first of hopefully many forthcoming national tours for Musica Viva Australia the Benedetti Elschenbroich Grynyuk Trio (a tongue-twister title) performed a thoughtfully conceived and generous program of largely Romantic repertoire in the City Recital Hall, Angel Place in Sydney on Saturday afternoon.

That this ensemble persists with its challenging name is evidence that each of its three musicians strongly identifies as a soloist who also happens to perform chamber music.  In sum, here was a piano trio of formidable skill that provided an energetic, passionate and charismatic recital.

The recital commenced with two solo sonatas by Richard Strauss for cello (Op 9) and violin (Op 18).  The former was a youthful composition demonstrating firm adherence to Austro-Germanic structure and form, while the Violin Sonata was able to spread its wings a little more freely.  In both works we were introduced to the extraordinary soloistic skills of pianist, cellist and violinist.  It was a joy to savour the deep sonorities of Leonard Elschenbroich’s ‘Leonard Rose’ cello by Matteo Goffriller (Venice, 1693).  The Andante ma non troppo was a little slow becoming almost moribundly tragic.  The delicate and animated Finale: Allegro vivo, though, charmed for its comical gestures, secular joy and amiable playfulness.

The Violin Sonata played by Nicola Benedetti is another traditional work in the genre and delighted for its broad phrasing and full-bodied elegance.  The second movement Improvisation: Andante cantabile was well conveyed as a half-remembered song, nostalgically rendered with exquisite piano descant figuration pre-empting the daring harmonic progressions that define this composer’s later language.  The Finale presented the pianist as particularly steeped in this repertoire.  A perfect chamber musician, Alexei Grynyuk was always supportive and in accord with his musician colleagues.  Triumphant melodic gestures reminiscent of Strauss’s later orchestral tone poems were given plenty of throttle by all three musicians.

Australian composer Gordon Kerry’s Im Winde (2000) provided exquisite restraint, inspired by a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin describing the brief pleasures of Summer before the necessary bleakness of a following Winter.  This icy and fragile score intrigued for its sporadic and fragmented narrative, its fastidious treatment of texture and expansive gestural rhetoric.  Sonic fragments often disintegrated as melting snowflakes.

The finest wine, however, was left until last with Brahms’s chamber music masterpiece, the Piano Trio No 2 in C major, Op 87 which received a truly masterful performance.  In the opening Allegro moderato we heard perfectly matched vibrato between strings, fine voicing and elastic phrasing.  Brahmsian rhetoric was flawlessly understood and conveyed.

The Andante con moto was a heartfelt lament with its melodic sighing, conveyed with the weight of bitter sadness.  The golden sunrise of the unison Trio section rose with a joyful burst in the Scherzo and blazed in full-bodied unison of the strings of the Finale: Allegro giocoso.

4 ½ stars ★★★★☆
Benedetti Elschenbroich Grynyuk Trio
Presented by Musica Viva Australia

10 November, 2018
City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney

David Barmby
About the Author
David Barmby is former head of artistic planning of Musica Viva Australia, director of music at St James' Anglican Church, King Street, artistic administrator of Bach 2000 (Melbourne Festival), the Australian National Academy of Music and Melbourne Recital Centre.