A record which will surely be attractive to people with an interest in the historical approach to performing Classical chamber music. Roger Fiske liked the previous one in the series (Hyperion A66093, 6/84), and indeed I hope these records will be sampled by everyone with a curiosity about the playing styles of the pass and about the variety of piano sound that was a feature of that instrument's early history. The London Fortepiano Trio claim there's perhaps no form of chamber music which benefits more from the historical approach than the piano trio of hadyn's and Mozart's day. I think these accomplished performances of two of Mozart's greatest trios proved the point very effectively.
The piano of 1797 Linda Nicholson plays is by Schantz, a Viennese maker well known to Haydn. The violin and cello of her colleagues are in a condition contemporary with it, and the resulting sonorities offer some quite startlingly different perspectives and emphases. The matching of the instruments in weight and timbre is much closer than we're accustomed to hearing, when so often the string parts give the impression of being beefed up in order to balance the modern piano. In these recordings the strings never need to be insistent. And since Mozart gives almost all the opening statements to the piano alone in these works—in five of the six movements the piano leads—an important role that falls to the strings in one enhancement. At the point in the first movements where the strings first enter, it's instructive to note this subtle change of emphasis; and how delightful, it seems to me, the gentler effect is. The less powerful Classical violin and cello are better at being supportive in the texture than their modern counterparts, and since even in Mozart's maturest music the origins of the piano trio in the accompanied piano solo are still manifest, there is a gain with the old instruments in the communication of musical sense.
Throughout the record I found many welcome and refreshing surprises. I'm not sure, however, that the strings always project themselves enough when Mozart gives them a fully emancipated part to play—in the development of the first movement of K496, for example, or the passages of chromatic discursiveness in the Andante. I want stronger contributions there, from the cello especially. The cello again is too diffident in the last four bars of the first movement, in a line which must tell in the texture; and similarly in the finale the character of the G minor variation fails to come into focus because the sonorities of the strings lack definition. But there are few suhc miscalculations. The second and third movements of the magnificent E major Trio K542 are particularly enjoyable—justly paced, fresh in feeling, full of delightful detail. Unhurried tempos are a feature of the playing, which I like, though you may agree that the Andante of K496 could have been pressed in order to move the music on more elegantly over the strong beats. The players take both repeats in the first movements—the second one to little effect in K542, it seems to me, though in the earlier work there is perhaps a gain since the beginning of the development is such a dramatic moment.
I dare say a different microphone balance could have prevented my feeling that the violin and cello are sometimes being too accompanimental. The recording of the piano is good. If you still hold back, let me say that there seems to me nothing antiquarian about the appeal of the record, nor any doubt about the London Fortepiano Trio's commitment to Mozart. The word 'authentic' isn't mentioned once on the sleeve—and for that let the heavens be praised.'