Review: Han-Setzer-Finckel trio

Sept. 15, Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU’s Rennolds Chamber Concerts concluded last season with one of the last performances of cellist David Finckel with the Emerson String Quartet. The series opened its 2012-13 season with Finckel returning with his wife, pianist Wu Han, and his now-former Emerson colleague, violinist Philip Setzer.

In recent years, the three have been regular collaborators, onstage and in the recording studio, in the piano-trio repertory. They played the two Schubert trios two years ago at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Arts Center; in this return visit, they reprised the Trio in B flat major, Op. 99/D. 898. The VCU date also featured performances of Haydn’s Trio in A major and Mendelssohn’s Trio in D minor, Op. 49.

The Schubert and Mendelssohn are, of course, two of the greatest hits of the piano trio, written within a few years of each other (1828 and 1839, respectively) by composers whose music straddled the classical and romantic styles. The Mendelssohn D minor is, as its key signature portends, more dramatically expressive, and is also quite economical in its development of musical materials. The Haydn also says its piece without much dawdling. The Schubert trio, on the other hand, is one of the preeminent examples of this composer’s working out of materials at “heavenly length,” or with lots of repetition.

Han, Setzer and Finckel produced more variety in inflection and dynamics than might have been expected in this relatively narrow band of repertory. Their collective tonal profile varied very little, though.

The three are master practitioners of what I call New York-standard music-making – pitch-perfect, sonically robust, interpretively straightforward, generally taking a one-sound-fits-all approach with few, if any, nods toward the historical performance practices now frequently employed in classical and early romantic music. Their sound is refined and streamlined. It fills a modern concert space nicely; but its unvarying quality can get monotonous, and one rarely senses real spontaneity in the performance.

The Mendelssohn, a turbulent work full of sharp accents and abrupt attacks, drew the most engaged and expressive performance from the threesome. Violinist Setzer’s finely spun tone and subtle inflections added some variety (not enough) to Schubert’s repetitions. A brisk finale rescued what had been a tidy but humorless reading of the Haydn.