Music Reviews : Beaux Arts Trio Ends Music Guild Season

The Wilshire Ebell Theatre was packed--and very hot--on Wednesday for the Music Guild’s season-ending presentation of the Beaux Arts Trio. The playing of a super-familiar program, however, took some time to warm up.

Interest centered on a presumed new Beaux Arts sound, dependent on cellist Peter Wiley, recently arrived to replace founding member Bernard Greenhouse. The change has been effective, particularly for the revitalization of violinist Isidore Cohen, who often seemed in recent years to be inhabiting the same remote planet on which Greenhouse dwelled.

So, what had come in some quarters to be regarded as Menahem Pressler and Companions--the fiery pianist always being up to and involved in the task--once more is an ensemble.

Which is not to say that things always went smoothly Wednesday. To begin with, Mozart’s bracingly forthright Trio in E, K. 542, was subjected to romantic overinterpretation of the most blatant sort, with Pressler’s extravagant rubatos and Cohen’s “expressive” fade-out dynamics proving particularly inapt.

The same approach may have been better suited to the Ravel Trio in A minor, which followed. But it remained for the listener to endure two movements of taffy-pulling before Ravel’s creation took perceptible shape with the Beaux Arts’ exquisitely balanced, ecstatically tense reading of the Pasacaille and their uninhibited dispatching of the flamboyant finale.

Finally, Schubert’s Trio in E flat, D. 929, was accorded an uncommonly swift, energetic reading--enlivened particularly by the light-toned, bantering interplay between violinist and cellist in the first and third movements, poignantly reminding us that at the end of his life, when this for the most part deep and grand work was written, Schubert was still a very young man.