Capuçon-Angelich Trio

Read my review published today on the Washington Post Web site:

Capuçon-Angelich Trio: Brahms Mendelssohn Schumann

Charles T. Downey, Capuçon-Angelich Trio echoes past performance in DC recital
Washington Post, February 4, 2010

If well-played chamber music is like an engaging conversation, the capacity audience at La Maison Française on Tuesday night was witness to an intense tête-à-tête-à-tête. The trio of the Capuçon brothers and pianist Nicholas Angelich played with an edgy buzz reminiscent of their 2008 Kennedy Center concert, perhaps because two-thirds of the program was exactly the same.

While violinist Renaud Capuçon and cellist Gautier Capuçon have enjoyed a meteoric rise to notoriety, it was Angelich who impressed the most in this concert. The trio played Haydn's G major "alla Ungarese" trio (Hob. XV:25) with disarming simplicity. Angelich's agile hands provided sparkling diversion in the piece's extensive Rococo decoration, especially in the exceedingly fast final movement, based on Hungarian folk style.

A devastating rendition of Shostakovich's second piano trio, composed in response to the death of the composer's friend Ivan Sollertinsky, was the program's emotional high point. Gautier's tendency toward blue-note, slightly off intonation worked best here in the precarious cello harmonics of the anguished first movement. While the second movement had an appropriately driven, bloodthirsty quality, it was the deliberate, almost heavy-footed final movement, a leaden danse macabre that grudgingly resolved to major, that was most striking. [Continue reading]

Capuçon-Angelich Trio
Music by Beethoven, Shostakovich, Brahms
La Maison Française

PREVIOUSLY:
2008 WPAS recital | Nicholas Angelich (Corcoran Gallery of Art) | Renaud Capuçon | Capuçon Brothers | NSO concert

Shostakovich, Piano Trio No. 2
Beaux Arts Trio | Amadeus Trio | Gutman-Moroz-Shteinberg Trio | Triple Helix Trio