MUSIC REVIEW : Leonardo Trio in Southland Debut at Sunny Hills Center

Chamber ensembles, like fine wines, generally require a certain maturation before their full potential comes to fruition. At the tender musical age of five years, the Leonardo Trio not only bestows sweet pleasure but hints at even more delectable music-making in years to come.

Frank Martin’s rarely heard “Trio on Irish Folk Tunes” opened the group’s Southland debut concert Sunday at the Sunny Hills Performing Art Center. Whether the piece was programmed in honor of the Swiss composer’s centennial or not, the group convincingly captured the requisite flavor of the title without short-changing the nuances inherent in the 1924 work.

Even when it came to familiar composers, the Leonardo chose musical roads less taken: for Beethoven, not the “Archduke” or “Ghost” trios, but Opus 70, No. 2 in E-flat. Its four movements (all in moderate to quick tempos) emerged dominated by the least likely characteristic associated with the composer’s music: unabashed lyricism.

Despite a Baldwin piano that stubbornly refused to produce any songful sounds in its upper register, Cameron Grant compensated with discreet pedaling and subtle voicing. Cellist Jonathan Spitz displayed nothing but the richest tone in all registers, particularly burnished in the lower range. And if an occasional thinness of sound blemished the violin artistry of Erica Kiesewetter, her gift for persuasively blending with her colleagues proved the more lasting impression.

Only judiciously gauged tempos will allow this work to make a cohesive whole, and it was here the ensemble revealed a special quality. By turns dance-like in the first movement, relaxed in the second, tender in the third and full-throttle in the finale, the trio took full measure of the piece and consistently supplied sensitive touches to motivic details.

But in Mendelssohn’s Trio in C-minor, the group failed to convey such a consistently rarefied atmosphere. Certainly the composer’s instructions regarding energico and con fuoco were never in short supply, and the Scherzo provided the mercurial element one expects; yet, in the end, the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts.

The capacity audience received one encore: a vivacious romp through the “Pantoum” movement of Ravel’s Trio in A minor.