Mutter Bashmet Harrell Trio At the Orpheum in Vancouver on Tuesday
Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, violist Yuri Bashmet and cellist Lynn Harrell are superlative musicians, but together they don't quite make a superlative string trio. Nor is Beethoven the music most suited to turn these three musical personalities into a unit.
Mutter has made Beethoven a particular focus in the past, and her playing of Beethoven tends to be extravagantly expressive. She mines each phrase for every possible emotional nuance, with quivery vibrato, sudden turns in dynamics, and minute stresses on individual notes. The result is much like an actor's face that registers every thought as it passes, however fleeting.
In Tuesday's performance the sentimental side of Mutter was less in evidence. Hers was by far the most aggressive voice, almost as if she didn't trust her colleagues to make these trios - one each from Opus 3, Opus 8 and Opus 9 - thrilling enough. Of the three works, the earliest, E Flat Major Trio, written when Beethoven was in his early 20s, was the most successful interpretation. The slow movements moved forward gently and Mutter was at her lyrical and impetuous best, spinning out seductive, mellifluous lines, even from truncated phrases. The finale, which owes so much to Haydn, was poised and witty, one of the few times all evening that the trio seemed to relax from an almost missionary zeal of proving Beethoven worthy of his divinity.
The fast movements were inordinately fast, however, a constant in all three trios. The opening allegros drove full speed through double bars without punctuation - not even a comma for breath. This can be exhilarating, as it was in the C minor Trio No. 3, Op. 9, but it sounded silly in the march that opens the Serenade in D Major, Op. 3. Presumably Beethoven titled it "march" knowingly.
Minuets also raced at breakneck tempos, making it hard to enjoy the games Beethoven was playing with rhythm. Double that for scherzos, especially the one that interrupts the haunting minor mode adagio from the Serenade. The word "scherzo" is usually understood as encompassing a sense of play, but one could have been forgiven on Tuesday for thinking it means "like an angry squirrel."
Bashmet's viola seemed to come from a separate, ethereal plane, his playing cool, floating and hollow-toned, his vibrato subdued, his intonation darker. (Mutter's thirds and leading tones were very high.) He surfaced for the occasional solo and then tucked back again. He was briefly, and magically, the dominant sound in the adagio from the Serenade, where violin and viola play the melody an octave apart, but Mutter soon took that role back.
Harrell, too, tended to efface himself, albeit delicately so in the many passages where the cello provides background accompaniment. His sweet-toned solos had an air of romantic, self-containment.
But the overall impression was not of the young and confident Beethoven who wrote these trios. What we heard reflected a Beethoven understood in hindsight from the pedestal of his later works and life and his exalted position in the musicological canon. Perhaps if the trios had been signed "Hummel" instead of Beethoven, there would have been less effort expended in proclaiming the significance of Beethoven's take on a minuet, say, and more effort spent in just playing a minuet. Every note sounded like an event. In fact, much in the music is merely carrying us toward an event, one that we should be able to recognize when it arrives.
Special to The Globe and Mail