Music Reviews : Trio d’Amsterdam Plays at Bullocks Wilshire

The Chamber Music in Historic Sites series came up with another winner.

The site was the intimate, acoustically and visually treasurable Directoire Room of Bullocks Wilshire, with its George de Winter murals that manage to move most of Paris’ monuments (including the Arc de Triomphe) to the banks of a country stream in which a Pocahontas-like maiden is taking a swim as assorted swains, children and a milkmaid (with cow) do their various things in the foreground. To see them--the murals--is to love them, instantly.

The Sunday evening program, presented with optimum polish and forcefulness on period instruments by the Trio d’Amsterdam--clarinetist Eric Hoeprich, pianist Stanley Hoogland, cellist Tanya Tomkins--and violist Lucy van Dael was brief and potent: Mozart’s sublime Trio in E-flat, K. 498; Weber’s featherweight, range-rovingly virtuosic and hugely entertaining “Sylvana” Variations, and Beethoven’s swaggering Trio in B-flat, Opus 11.

Hoeprich drew an astonishing variety of tone from two different instruments, a five-keyed clarinet for Mozart and Beethoven, one with perhaps twice that many keys for Weber’s convoluted tootling.

Hoogland’s fortepiano too proved remarkable for the strength, clarity and evenness of its tone--or was it that for once we were hearing these antiques in the kind of room for which they were intended?