Horszowski Trio Disappoints for Kohl Mansion

Horszowski Trio members Jesse Mills (violin), Rieko Aizawa (piano), and Ole Akahoshi (cello) (from the Trio’s home page)

Last night Music at Kohl Mansion live-streamed its video of a recital by the Horszowski Trio for the first of two times, the second being at 6 p.m. this Thursday, May 13. The performers include husband-and-wife Jesse Mills on violin and Rieko Aizawa on piano, who opened their home as the venue for recording the video. (Aizawa was the last pupil of Mieczysław Horszowski at the Curtis Institute of Music, and a poster of him is featured on one of the walls.) They were joined by cellist Ole Akahoshi, who first replaced founding cellist Raman Ramakrishnan at a streamed recital this past August 26.

The program offered a coupling of compositions from opposite ends of the nineteenth century. It began with Jean Sibelius’ “Louvisa,” the name he gave to his fourth and last piano trio, written in the key of C major in 1888. This was coupled with Franz Schubert’s D, 898 trio in B-flat major. Ironically, the Sibelius trio was composed early in his life, when he was 23 years old, while the Schubert trio was composed near the end of his life (in October of 1827) and was not published until almost a decade later.

Sibelius was studying at the Helsinki Music Institute (which is now called the Sibelius Academy) when he wrote the “Louvisa” trio. His strongest influences included Edvard Grieg and one of his teachers, Ferruccio Busoni. The products of his student efforts can be described as “before Sibelius became Sibelius.” Nevertheless, the Horszowski Trio gave a convincing account of the trio, whose second (slow) movement serves up a fugue that definitely discloses an unfamiliar aspect of the composer’s skills.

Sadly, however, the Trio could not make as strong a case for Schubert as they had made for Sibelius. There was too much of a sense of business-as-usual as they dutifully plowed their way across the the score’s four movements, each an engaging example of what Robert Schumann would later call Schubert’s “heavenly length.” Needless to say, there was nothing heavenly in the Trio’s performance. While it is true that there is a lot of repetition in the trio’s four movements, each iteration has is own affordances for surprising the listener. Unfortunately, none of those elements of surprise emerged, allowing tedium to get the better of any attempts at rapt engagement.

Perhaps conditions were just not conducive for accommodating Schubert’s rhetoric. The performers were clearly confined to a smaller space than a recital hall would afford, and they had to share that space with a bevy of both video and audio gear, presumably being managed by more than one technician. Even if Schubert never lived to hear this music performed, it probably fares best in a Schubertiade setting, which is hard to find in most musicians’ homes.