Altenberg Trio Makes the Most of Setting

Under the Da Camera Society’s director, MaryAnn Bonino, the main business of the operation known as Chamber Music in Historic Sites is music-making in rooms and locations of appropriate size and character.

At the latest Sites event, Sunday afternoon, the main musical components--the works, the performers and the instruments--came from the highest level of achievement. And the site was just about perfect as well.

The music: masterpieces of the piano trio form. The players: the splendidly accomplished and energetically over-the-top Altenberg Trio from Austria. The Italian instruments: matching violin and cello, both from the studio of Giovanni Guadagnini in the mid-1700s, and a recent Fazioli piano fully capable of great depth, frightening fury and exquisite tenderness.

All this added up to a splendid, one-time-only experience at the 1922 Canfield-Moreno Estate, at the top of a hill, the entire city below in a wraparound view, in Silver Lake. Once again a private residence after serving as a finishing school and a home for wayward girls, the Canfield-Moreno property boasts, among other architectural features, a high-ceilinged ballroom perfect for large-boned chamber music, such as these works are.

The rapt audience at the 2 p.m. performance (it was repeated at 3:30 as well) of Beethoven’s “Ghost” Trio and Schumann’s Trio in D minor received the ensemble’s impassioned performances in an engrossing silence, and with appropriate enthusiasm afterward. The technical authority of the players is matched by their spontaneity, and one will probably seldom hear more committed playing than comes from violinist Amiram Ganz, cellist Martin Hornstein and pianist Claus Christian Schuster.

These Viennese players’ deep stylistic identification with this music--especially with the great slow movements--perfectly realized these famous works. For the audience, neither of these pieces can ever sound the same again.