The Beaux Arts Trio have undergone several changes of personnel in more recent times. So I'll start by emphasizing that this three-disc set was recorded as long ago as 1965 by Guilet, Greenhouse and Pressler (the original members), some ten years after they first came together. By judicious omission of a number of repeats (though never vital ones) they fit in not just the six 'standard' Opp. 1 (Nos. 1, 2 and 3), 70 (Nos. 1 and 2) and 97 Trios (Archduke), together with the two familiar sets of Variations (Opp. 44 and 121a), but also the Op. 11 Clarinet Trio (in its alternative version for violin). Also included are the early E flat Trio in three movements (WoO38) and the single-movement B flat Allegretto (WoO39), published until after Beethoven's death. When Isidore Cohen replaced Guilet as violinist, the Beaux Arts took up the challenge anew on a 1983 recording (reissued on five CDs in 1991), which also includes piano trio arrangements of Beethoven's Second Symphony and Wind Septet. Pleasing as it all was, aficionados still looked back longingly to 1965. And now here is that older set, vividly enough reproduced on CD, to make it an outstanding bargain at mid price.
It's the immediacy and freshness, the wholehearted commitment of the playing that holds you spellbound in almost every context. My own extra-special pleasure came at the extremes of the journey, and to begin with, in the joie de vivre of the E flat and G major Op. 1 Trios. It's so good to be reminded that a colossus like Beethoven was once so young at heart—in the persuasive lyricism of slower tempos no less than the teasing, devil-may-care sparkle and wit of their finales (taken at a breathless pace without for a moment sounding gabbled). And never before had I realized just how much lay behind the seemingly conventional note-patterning of the still earlier (despite its opus number) 14 Variations on an Original Theme in E flat—thanks to these players' imaginative response to subtleties of tone colouring, no less than to innuendo of every other kind.
The crowning performance is nevertheless the Archduke. The players' expansive yet so warmly human nobility in the opening Allegro moderato, their urgent, mercurial response to the undertones of the Scherzo, their raptness in the visionary serenity of the slow movement and their pungency in the finale convinced me, as never before, that no greater piano trio has ever been written. Here, too, you're given the fullest chance to enjoy the silken beauty of Guilet's violin and the velvet richness of Greenhouse's now legendary 1707 Stradivari cello; also the wonderful blend of tone achieved by all three in contexts like the pizzicato/staccato of the first movement's development, or the eerie chromatic start to the trio of the Scherzo. Hailed in the booklet as ''the soul of the entire ensemble'', Pressler himself (incidentally the only one of the original three still at his post today) achieves so many miracles of delicacy and fleetness that I hate having to say that at certain more vehement moments I thought his piano too forward—not forgetting the opening Allegro con brio of the Clarinet Trio and the flanking movements of the Ghost. But this latter work springs at you off the disc at exceptionally high voltage—with a slow movement all the more intense for a slightly faster tempo (if I remember rightly) than in the later version from the Cohen-led group. I only wish the charming little B flat Allegretto, written for the ten-year-old daughter of Beethoven's friends the Bretanes, had been allowed a slightly easier flow.'