Neither of these two releases supersedes the earlier Chandos recording by the Borodin Trio: theirs is still, without doubt, a definitive performance of the Trio in D minor which Rachmaninov wrote in awed and grieving memory of Tchaikovsky, and in which he ''trembled for every phrase''. The Borodin speak of a tribute to friendship which is written in blood; the Beaux Arts shift that tribute a little nearer the salon; the Vienna Schubert Trio move it to the more rarified air of the academy.
I like the way the Beaux Arts never allow the first movement to become musically oppressed by its own introspection. They are always ready to turn a phrase from the dying fall of regret into a new upbeat of dance or determination. When it comes to the central variations, though, the Beaux Arts offer a series of delightful and delighted Russian tableaux, with Pressler's split chords and Cohen's sweet, almost Milstein-esque violin imparting a limpid, old-world style to playing which just misses the deeper stillness, the sharper contrast between foreground and background of the Borodin. Similarly, despite the full-bodied strength of each individual player's commitment to the finale, the Borodin create a sense of effort and space, of sheer physical excitement which makes the Beaux Arts' reading seem at times just too exuberant for the matter in hand.
If the Borodin paint on canvas, and the Beaux Arts create tableaux, then the Vienna Trio handcraft fine vignettes. Their central movement is characterized by clean, beautifully shaped piano phrasing, gliding strings and a feathery scherzando which passes in a trice. Despite its careful balance of parts and its many fine observations, the kid-gloved approach becomes a little pallid after a while: the outer movements in particular leave one feeling that the players are striving for a goal which their instruments (particularly the ascetic Bosendorfer) and their acoustic simply won't allow them.
The Beaux Arts, like the Borodin, also offer the little G minor Trio, for which there is no space on the Vienna Schubert Trio's LP. They emphasize its early date, where the Borodin see in it more than a shadow of things to come. Marginally fleeter, sweeter and quick on the uptake than the Borodin, the Beaux Arts take delight in changing light, colour and inflection at each repeated phrase, and eagerly seize on the new character of each returning theme in the light of what has gone before. It is left to the Borodin to search out and compress this work's latent power, by biting string articulation, and by a refusal to allow any let-up even in the rubato which rests between the risoluto of what they see as a tense and intense 15 minutes.'