DANCE AND MUSIC REVIEWS : Leonardo Trio Graceful at Doheny Mansion

The New York-based Leonardo Trio, making its third appearance for the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series, may have been familiar to the audience attending its concert on Friday at the Doheny Mansion. It was, however, a first encounter for this listener and, it is hoped, not the last.

The Leonardo Trio, comprising pianist Cameron Grant, violinist Erica Kiesewetter and cellist Jonathan Spitz, is as accomplished an entity as any in its field: interpretively alert, technically secure, optimally balanced in tone and temperament.

The players were able to make distinctions both broad and minute between the repertory works offered, the young Beethoven’s delectably flashy Trio in E-flat, Opus 1, No. 1, and, from Schubert’s ripest maturity, the mighty Trio, D. 929, also in E-flat.

For Beethoven, the Leonardo offered bright, edgy sonorities, with brittle phrasing in the three fast movements and a plush sonic ambience for the seraphic slow movement.

In the Schubert, individual and ensemble sonority became rounder, dynamic contrasts more extreme. An interpretation of power, subtlety and grace.

Sandwiched between these disparate monuments was the local premiere of a 20-year-old Trio by Korea’s Isang Yun, once an icon of the international avant-garde, at least as much for his outspoken (and cruelly punished) opposition to the repressiveness of the South Korean regime of the 1960s as for his music.

At this remove, the Trio sounds like a relic, with its arhythmic lines and mistily “Eastern” sonorities, replete with sul ponticello keenings, col legno scrapings and, inevitably for its time, (or even earlier), plucked and strummed piano strings.

To judge by the Leonardo Trio’s expertise elsewhere, the performance, sponsored by the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College, must have been authoritative.