Schubert Ensemble Balances Right Elements

The piano-strings chamber repertory is so often left to ad-hoc ensembles where pianists are grafted onto existing string quartets, where piano trios take on additional floating string players, where clusters of solo stars thrash it out at festivals, etc. You might gain spontaneity that way, but you often lose balance and direction--and to hear the splendid Schubert Ensemble of London at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium on Sunday afternoon was to realize what a full-time piano/strings ensemble can do.

In Faure’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor and Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, the ensemble displayed a nearly supernatural degree of polish, seamless streams of rhetoric and, in the “Trout,” a deliciously rollicking extra kick to the rhythms. The key to this group seems to be pianist William Howard, a master of his specialized craft. He keeps the piano in perfect balance with the three or four strings; his touch is light and flexible. Even at fortissimo levels on a 9-foot Steinway with the lid fully open, he never dominates yet is always clearly heard.

The group is also, thank goodness, interested in new music, represented here by one of its commissions, “I Broke Off a Golden Branch” by Britain’s Judith Weir. Built in part upon a Croatian folk song, the quintet opens with unusual spatial harmonies and jazzy syncopations only to become quiet, dazed, gradually more agitated and less coherent. This sudden shift in mood is said to be Weir’s reaction to the outbreak of the early 1990s Balkan wars, and it seems to throw the piece off its axis.