Music Reviews : Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio at LACMA

The trio comprising pianist Joseph Kalichstein, violinist Jaime Laredo and cellist Sharon Robinson is hardly a stranger to these parts, as attested by the large, clearly partisan audience present in the Leo S. Bing Theater of the L.A. County Museum of Art on Wednesday.

The three may be a familiar presence, but with each successive appearance they seem to add a layer of depth or, at the very least, daring to their interpretations.

In a strongly knit, unhackneyed program, the risk-taking came in Shostakovich’s E-minor Trio.

Shostakovich remains a composer about whom interpretive options are still being weighed, resulting in startling disparities among various performers’ views of his music.

The present artists delivered the second movement at such a breathless pace that the score’s “Allegro non troppo” marking was rendered meaningless, as were the glissandos that are central to defining its air of the macabre.

Still, one had to be impressed by the players’ perfectly timed attacks and their ability to sustain not only solidity but also beauty of tone.

In the finale, on the other hand, the trio opted for a slower-than-customary tempo, building to a series of huge, crunching climaxes via a harrowingly sustained crescendo and barely perceptible increases in tempo.

Surrounding this enigmatic, 20th-Century masterpiece were Haydn’s Trio in E minor, Hob. 12, delivered with the requisite crisp elegance, and the lovable excesses of Schumann’s Trio in D minor in which Laredo’s sweetly warm tone served as the keystone of a graceful, architecturally cohesive reading.