MUSIC REVIEWS : Eroica Trio Offers Evening of Uncommon Delights at USC

The Eroica Trio--pianist Erika Nickrenz, violinist Adela Pen~a and cellist Sara Sant’Ambrogio--gave a knockout concert at Bovard Auditorium on the USC campus on Wednesday. These people have it all: technique, temperament, interpretive savvy, good looks and a winning stage presence.

That this would be an evening of uncommon delights was apparent at the outset, in the elegantly contoured opening measures of Mozart’s Trio in B-flat, K. 502, which for once did not serve as a warm-up but was delivered with the players already at their peak--where they remained throughout the evening. Their rapt yet rhythmically alive traversal of the slow movement in particular made this one of the most affecting performances of a Mozart chamber work within recent memory.

Josef Suk’s brief, crooning-at-the-moon “Elegie” served as a graceful bridge from the profound simplicity and lucidity of Mozart to the boggling complexities of rhythm and balance propounded by Charles Ives in his loopy Trio, begun in 1904 and nominally completed in 1911, but which the composer might still be working on--making it ever more tangled--were he alive today.

The Eroica Trio delighted in its challenges, finding and projecting the score’s deeply buried Romantic subtext with a degree of skill bordering on the uncanny. The popular tunes and hymns were exposed with optimum clarity and a quality that has its place in even this most gnarled of pieces: beauty of tone.

The program concluded with an alternately broad and fiery reading of Brahms’ Trio in B, Opus 8 (1890 version) in which the members of the Eroica Trio achieved and maintained the chamber-music ideal of ensemble unity and individual distinction.