Luxurious, Well-Blended Sounds Mark Pacific Trio Performance

The Pacific Trio has been a permanent group for nearly 20 years, and the steadily developing empathy among violinist Endre Balogh, cellist John Walz and pianist Edith Orloff is obvious. All are solid, reliable soloists on their own. Yet as in any effective chamber group, they don’t flaunt their virtuosity and personalities; they subordinate them to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Moreover, in their benefit concert Sunday night for the Temple Ohr HaTorah, of which Balogh is an incoming director for 1999-2001, they happened to be playing in a very friendly room, the Zipper Auditorium of the Colburn School. The acoustics tended to favor the cello and piano at the expense of the violin, giving the bass end of the piano an especially huge presence. But the total blend was so mellow, warm and woodsy that it created a greater union; you could almost forget the nuts-and-bolts of interpretation and just luxuriate in the sound.

The hall supported the relaxed, aristocratic, legato treatment of Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio; the players created a lovely, sustained mood in the third movement, and even the weird, futuristic chromatics of the second movement’s Trio seemed comfortable.

Next, as an intermezzo, the three offered Bloch’s undeservedly obscure Three Nocturnes for Piano Trio--three gorgeous, perfectly shaped little things laced with reminders of Debussy and a few unpredictable turns in direction. Much of the performance of Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor had plenty of the specified dash and vehemence, along with telling passages like Balogh’s sweetly direct second-movement solo melting into the rustic warmth of Walz’s solo as if they were two halves of a single instrument. As an encore, the trio added a brilliant rendering of Haydn’s mercurial Gypsy Rondo.