MUSIC REVIEW : Trio Closes Music Guild Season

Athleticism has its place in chamber-music performance, a place more often under- than overvalued by musicians. Not so with the Starr-Kim-Boeckheler Trio--here to close the Music Guild’s 49th season this week--which brought a no-holds-barred approach to its program in Gerald R. Daniel Recital Hall at Cal State Long Beach Monday night.

This made for consistently exciting, active and generous music-making, and for mixed results. Stylistic niceties went by the wayside in the trio’s varied offerings and in their place stood a one-size-fits-all aggressiveness.

In Beethoven’s Trio in C minor, Opus 1, No. 3, this led to some appropriately virile playing. It also meant muscularity where Classical finesse and grace would have done better.

The group--violinist Chin Kim, cellist Ulrich Boeckheler and pianist Susan Starr--seems inspired to its vigor by Starr, an impressively gifted technician with a massive tone that she uses a great deal. In the Daniel Hall acoustics her pounding accents became wearing.

The ensemble’s traversal of Ravel’s Trio avoided prissy Gallicisms altogether, replacing them with a full-blown Romanticism. This worked, for the most part, in the resplendent outer movements, but in the more impressionistic and delicate inner ones it seemed oversized, bullish.

The trio hit its stride after intermission not by changing its style but by changing its tune in grappling with meaty music--Tchaikovsky’s big, grand, sumptuous, excessive A-minor Trio, played to the hilt and then some by the untiring musicians.