Music Reviews : Chungs’ Program Promises More Than They Deliver

The Chung Trio brought a program that looked strong and enticing to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center on Tuesday evening, courtesy of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It promised hot and cold running emotions, intriguing musical interconnections and a dollop of historical interest.

What crossed the proscenium, though, proved a little disappointing, in the first half at least. It was partly due to the pieces, and partly to the distancing effect of the Pavilion reaches, unbridged by the playing of violinist Kyung-Wha Chung, cellist Myung-Wha Chung and pianist Myung-Whun Chung.

Shostakovich’s First Trio is a student relic, exhumed after his death and heard in the West only in this decade. The episodic, repetitious one-movement work reveals surprisingly little of the acerbic, volatile, possessed, often depressed composer familiar from later works--even so little later as his First Symphony.

Indeed, the piece has much more in common with Tchaikovsky’s Opus 50 Trio, which followed it in the concert, than with Shostakovich’s own mature work, such as his Second Trio, which closed the printed agenda.

The Chung performance began tentatively and developed fitfully. It looked passionate, but the aural results seemed small-scale, and little was done to impose coherent order and a sense of purposeful direction on the wayward, lumpish piece.

In Tchaikovsky’s Trio, the siblings again allowed a sprawling, sectional work to unravel. They paused seemingly after every variation, killing momentum and any effort toward cumulative climax.

Their playing, however, was nicely balanced, suave in sound and ensemble. It was still too remote in the more extroverted moments, but the elegiac passages emerged in chill, somber focus.

In Shostakovich’s E-minor Trio, composed 21 years after the First, the Chungs finally integrated their collection of impressive moments into a unified performance of great impact. They spun clear, incisive lines, harnessed the explosive motor energy effectively, and allowed the finale its desperate, cathartic hysteria, which collapsed in telling, gradually frozen emotional exhaustion.

Steady, insistent applause brought the group back for a fleet, frothy run through the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s D-minor Trio.