Music : Beaux Arts Trio Returns to Ambassador

Any observer in doubt about the current state of the Beaux Arts Trio would have become a believer again--a more fiercely dedicated one than ever--during the course of the veteran ensemble’s Saturday concert at Ambassador Auditorium.

It is difficult to recall even these players--pianist Menahem Pressler, violinist Isidore Cohen and the group’s most recent addition (in 1987), cellist Peter Wiley--unfolding the glories of Schubert’s E-flat Trio with such a potent combination of drama, lyric grace and richness of tone.

This was the work of masters to whom there is no such thing as overly familiar repertory, only music in which new wonders are to be uncovered with each additional encounter.

Earlier in the evening, Mozart’s Trio in G, K. 496, was dispatched with disarming wit and fluency and, in a shining display of dedication to a lost cause, the players giving their enormous all to the Trio in D minor (1895) of Alexander von Zemlinsky, an overwrought, gratuitous study in Brahmsian semi-darkness.