Forming their trio in 1987, these three young French musicians chose Wanderer because of their affinity with German repertory alongside their special feeling for Schubert. So it’s good to have their account of the Austrian composer’s four works for piano trio conveniently offered on two CDs. The relative rarity is the slight single-movement Allegro in B flat, unpublished until 1923, where the cello is still much the underdog. But these players bring such rhythmic vitality and vivid dynamic contrast that it’s hard to credit this music as written by a schoolboy of 15.
Schubert’s unquestioned masterpiece in this medium, the last Trio in E flat, was the only one of his chamber works ever published (or played at a public concert) before his death at 31. Few life-loving composers have ever been more haunted by spectres of death at so early an age, and it is this conflict between hope and despair that these players, with their sharp dynamic contrasts and incisive accentuation, project at a near Beethovenian voltage. The slow movement has an aching inevitability as eloquent as Winterreise’s ‘Gute Nacht’.
The first of the two discs pairs the B flat Trio with the single-movement Notturno (thought by some to have been the originally intended slow movement for this work), both conceived during the same fateful last two years. The B flat Trio, though not without its upsurges of disquiet, is free of the pain underlying the E flat, its sunnier buoyancy of spirit conveyed while the players preserve their own authoritatively masculine style. They maintain it no less in the Notturno, which, despite its delicately shaded opening section, emerges less as a romantic night-piece than a stiff-upper-lipped processional salute to some late-lamented hero. The recording is crystal clear