MUSIC REVIEW : A Trio’s Sum Outshines Its Parts

Anyone with brains is going to want to keep the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio from leaving town. Sigh. It’s probably too late.

At least the trio left memories of a virtually ideal concert, co-sponsored by the Orange County Philharmonic Society and the Laguna Chamber Music Society at the Irvine Barclay Theatre Tuesday night.

Pianist Joseph Kalichstein, violinist Jaime Laredo and cellist Sharon Robinson played works by Haydn, Mendelssohn and Schubert with warmth and incandescent intelligence. Each musician made an individual contribution, but the sum was greater than the parts. The three matched, supported and spurred each other on, whether in matters of tone-color or phrasing or structure or dynamic.

The uncanny result was that the music (even though sometimes marred by Laredo’s faulty intonation) sounded as if it were emerging for the first time, rather than resulting from rehearsal.

The trio brought airy and easy grace, caressing phrases and popping good humor to Haydn’s Trio in A, Hob. XV:18, a work that lavishes more responsibilities on the pianist than on the string players, and more on the violinist than on the poor cellist who has continuo duties.

Robinson was rewarded for her attentive if inconspicuous labor in the Haydn by getting to initiate the noble first and the ardent second theme of Mendelssohn’s Trio in D minor, Opus 49.

After intermission, the musicians led the audience into the deeper, complex, wistful world of Schubert’s Trio in E-flat, Opus 100, a work that was given exposure on the silver screen when Stanley Kubrick appropriated the second movement for endless repetitions during his 1975 film, “Barry Lyndon.”

The work’s own internal repetitions and lengths pose challenges to sustain interest. The trio met them and triumphed in all cases.