Austrian trio makes West Coast debut
A rarely used faux-rococo salon, all cream and gilt, with mirrors, fireplace, tiny balcony, organ pipes and a nonworking organ console, was the bizarrely elegant setting Wednesday for the West Coast debut of Austria’s Haydn Trio Eisenstadt. The room had been part of the Hancock mansion at the corner of Vermont and Wilshire and was dismantled and reinstalled in USC’s Hancock Museum in 1941.
Like the room, two of the three composers on the program -- Alexander von Zemlinsky and Erich Wolfgang Korngold -- were transplants: in their case, Viennese who fled Austria in the 1930s to avoid persecution by the Nazis. Korngold, who had been taught by Zemlinsky, went to work in Hollywood, essentially establishing the lavish film-score style that dominated the industry for decades. Zemlinsky died neglected and forgotten in New York in 1942.
Korngold was a ferociously talented prodigy who wrote his first published work and the final piece on the program, the five-movement Piano Trio in D, when he was 13. It was not his first major work, however. A few months earlier he had already drawn admiring attention with a two-act ballet, “Der Schneemann” (The Snowman).
The trio has an audacious boldness and strength and veers from one idea and impulse to another with disconcerting speed. It was most attractive in the first movement, when adolescent bravado often yielded to melting sweetness, capturing the emotional flux of a young soul. Later, the kaleidoscopic onslaught became increasingly dizzying.
Pianist Harald Kosik, violinist Verena Stourzh and cellist Hannes Gradwohl played the piece with devout concentration and superb cohesion. But their performance of Zemlinsky’s Piano Trio in D minor, composed in 1896, a year before Korngold’s birth, may have been the real discovery of the program.
A richly conflicted work, it continues the Brahmsian Romantic style, thinning the textures while maintaining the style’s emotional expressivity and even its Hungarian-like rhythms.
The ensemble, which has become one of Austria’s leading chamber music groups since its founding in 1992, opened the program with its namesake composer’s Piano Trio in C, Hob: XV:27, an upbeat, cheerful work that the musicians infused with delight and infectious good humor.
They appeared under the sponsorship of the Austrian Consulate. The program was held in conjunction with a Korngold exhibition at USC that will run through Dec. 7 at the Doheny Memorial Library.
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