The E flat Trio is immediately handicapped by the slowest, most ponderous reading of the first movement I’ve encountered, and it never really recovers. Though competent enough, the three young German players consistently sound too dutiful and inhibited to enter imaginatively into Schubert’s world: phrasing tends to be flat and unalluring, rhythms lack point and lift, and when rubato is used, as in the lyrical second group of the opening Allegro (from 2'14''), it sounds applied from without rather than growing inevitably from the curve of the line and the flux of the harmony. The opening of the Andante, very dourly intoned by the cellist, is quite bereft of its crucial con moto feel – as much a question of phrasing and accent as tempo – and the third movement suggests little of Schubert’s prescribed scherzando spirit.
As on several other recent versions, including that by Shiokawa/Perenyi/Schiff on Decca, the players open out the composer’s cuts in the finale: but in a performance short on caprice, wit and dramatic energy, the movement’s structure sounds even more dangerously sprawling than usual. There are incidental pleasures here, including some crisp, delicate playing from the pianist on a silvery-toned Viennese fortepiano of c1820. But as a period-instrument version of the E flat Trio this new disc is a non-starter alongside the Mozartean Players on Harmonia Mundi or the more exuberant, boldly etched reading by La Gaia Scienza, rightly praised by DD last December.'