MUSIC REVIEWS : Trio Offers Imaginative Chamber Set

The Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio is a model chamber ensemble, in which corporate agreement does not preclude individuality, as indicated throughout their imaginatively constructed Coleman Chamber Concerts program at Beckman Auditorium on Sunday.

One could note, with pleasure, the group’s technical security and then forget about it. It never wavered during the course of a longish but by no means overextended agenda that pursued a broad stylistic gamut, with sensitivity to each composer’s specific needs in terms of sonority, rhythmic scheme and dynamic range.

Thus, Haydn’s Trio in C (No. 27) was crisply direct in delivery, with pianist David Golub the fluidly commanding focal point, while in the program’s blockbuster, the gorgeous, grandly emotional Opus 65 Trio, in F minor, of Dvorak, the performers tactfully revealed themselves as individuals within an ensemble framework.

For instance, the strings didn’t simply imitate each other during their frequent phrase-swappings. Rather, they played off each other, with violinist Mark Kaplan introducing, as if improvised, subtle rubatos, and cellist Colin Carr offering a dynamic variant or fractional change in tempo, always with pianist Golub’s firm underpinning--or commanding solo flights--in Dvorak’s hectic dances and arching melodies.

The least familiar component of the program, Swiss composer Frank Martin’s 1925 Trio on Popular Irish Themes (“popular” as in folk, rather than “everybody-knows-them”), proved no mere novelty introduced for novelty’s sake. It’s substantial, handsomely crafted stuff, in which 20th-Century rhythmic edginess, late-blooming reminiscences of Impressionist wispiness and striking Irish modalities combine to bracing effect, the whole rounded off by a furious jig that conjures up visions of Stravinsky zapping “The Irish Washerwoman.”

The Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio served Martin, as they did Haydn, Dvorak and, in an encore, the teen-aged Debussy, with unflagging affection, intelligence and aplomb.