Schubertiade

Kaleidoscope of chamber music

Violinist Viviane Hagner, Till Fellner on the piano and cellist Adrian Brendel delighted the audience.

(Bild: (c) Schubertiade GmbH)

A top-class ensemble of soloists came together in Hohenems on Friday to perform a piano trio. The audience was treated to an exciting and popular concert.

Chamber music at concert level can be performed in different ways. Either in a fixed, well-rehearsed formation, of which the "Beaux Arts Trio" is an example - to stay with the piano trio genre - which has existed for more than fifty years. However, musicians who pursue a solo career and only occasionally perform chamber music come together time and again, especially for festivals. This is particularly exciting and also appeals to the public. The trio that came together in Hohenems on Friday evening was a very special case, as it was made up of soloists who were influenced by the same great teacher.

The Viennese Till Fellner is a pupil of Alfred Brendel, and the cellist Adrian Brendel carries on the spirit of the great pianist as his son - which is not a matter of course. The two were joined in Hohenems by the Munich violinist Viviane Hagner, who has performed with Till Fellner on several occasions.

The program of the three read like a model catalog of music for the piano trio. It began with Haydn, the inventor of this genre. This was followed by Dmitri Shostakovich's Trio Opus 67, one of the most important piano trios of the twentieth century, before finally paying homage to the genius loci of Franz Schubert with the wonderful Trio in B flat major.

World-class soloists
The most precise interplay and a highly developed ability to listen to each other is a matter of course with these three world-class soloists. The result was an extraordinarily wide range of expression, which reached its climax with Shostakovich. The most delicate flageolet of the cello and violin at the beginning, then a build-up to energetic, even threatening motoric, an expressive color that recurs several times during the work and can certainly be understood politically. In contrast to this is the third movement, in which the two strings raise a lament over chorale-like chords in the piano.

Viviane Hagner, Adrian Brendel and Till Fellner played Haydn's Trio No. 24 powerfully right from the start, and for Schubert's Trio in B flat major they found every conceivable elegance and all the richness of color that makes this work so popular. The audience was already extremely enthusiastic after Shostakovich, and then also after Schubert, so that the musicians were finally persuaded to play an encore - a movement by Haydn. Anna Mika