Music Reviews : Borodin Trio Plays at Royce Hall, UCLA

The Borodin Trio presented a long, demanding program with its customary skill in Royce Hall at UCLA on Sunday afternoon. But 50 minutes of the Herz-Schmerz Tchaikovsky A-minor Trio, preceding (after a faintly vivifying intermission) the Angst- laden half-hour of Shostakovich’s Trio in E minor proved nearly stupefying.

While the lush, rock-steady playing of violinist Rotislav Dubinsky, cellist Yuli Turovsky and pianist Luba Edlina could only fleetingly mitigate the pall cast by a prevalence of minor modes and dark moods, there could be no denying the validity of the players’ interpretations.

Tchaikovsky’s succulent tunes--above all the A-minor motto that is repeated ad infinitum during the course of his work--rang out with sonorous splendor. And one couldn’t fail to be gripped by the savagely mocking “Yiddish” finale of the Shostakovich, projected here with the virtuosity and disciplined ensemble without which its black humor can sound merely like wrong-note crankiness.

That the program was determined by taste rather than caprice was indicated by the players’ decision to close the concert with a comic release from all that brooding and tension: the featherweight Trio in C major, H. 27, of Joseph Haydn.

The piece is all the pianist’s show, and in the stylish conception and nimble fingers of Luba Edlina, a paragon of chamber-music pianists, one could entertain the thought that the sun might, after all, rise the next morning.