Orange County Calendar : Piano Trio Gets to the Heart of Ravel

Beethoven and Brahms composed from the heart, as everyone knows. But Ravel?

Well, yes, as the Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio showed in a program of these composers sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Orange County Philharmonic Society on Wednesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Composed on the eve of the World War I, Ravel’s Trio in A minor usually emerges as the composer’s deliberate effort to remain objective and cool rather than to reflect the traumatic time his society had entered. Not in the hands of pianist David Golub, violinist Mark Kaplan and cellist Colin Carr, however. And more power to them.

From passing easily in the first two movements between bucolic insouciance and surging cross rhythms--and clarifying the music’s structure in the process--the players turned to heavier stuff in the third, the Passacaille, venturing a deeply felt protest of mounting desolation.

Theirs was a muscular and complex interpretation, and, in juxtaposition with it, the opening measures of the finale emerged as a spectral sunrise. Life--or maybe simply energy--goes on: But it achieves no special catharsis.

At a less demanding level, Beethoven’s infrequently encountered Fourteen Variations on an Original Theme in E-flat, Opus 44, also allows a survey of various emotions, as the composer takes a couple of nondescript, meandering arpeggios for a base to pursue episodes of wit, good-natured humor and darker moodiness.

He doesn’t do it with supreme cohesion or well-apportioned equality among the three instruments, however. But the musicians here found the appropriate air of improvisatory spontaneity that suited the composer’s nimble shifts in character, without losing their nuanced and responsive ensemble.

They closed the program with a magisterial and sensitive interpretation of Brahms’ Piano Trio in B, which, if it did not probe all the depths of this remarkable score, still richly responded to its warmth and nobility.

Typical problems of balancing the three instruments surfaced despite the forward placing of the violin and the cello. On this occasion, the piano tended to dominate. Still, the music-making remained vibrant and compelling.

The Scherzo from Brahms’ Trio in C minor was the encore.