RSNO Chamber, 06/11/2022
Shostakovich : Piano Trio No. 2*
Shostakovich : Piano Quintet
Susan Tomes, piano
Sharon Roffman, violin*
Maya Iwabuchi, violin
Lena Zeliszewska, violin
Tom Dunn, viola
Pei-Jee Ng, cello
The Sunday afternoon chamber music concerts are always a pleasure to attend (even more so now the Concert Hall has started serving very tasty cream teas beforehand!), but although the idea of this one might look good on paper, in effect, the programme wasn't entirely judiciously chosen. The problem is that the two works have too much in common with each other. The Trio may be much darker and angrier, but it came across as the Quintet in concentrated form; the fugue, the heavy slow movement, the spiky scherzo, and the relatively restrained piano part are all shared elements that, at least in these musicians' hands, only reinforced the similarities.
I attribute much of this 'sameness' of impression to Susan Tomes's playing. She's a very well-known and well-established soloist and chamber musician in particular. I heard many of her Florestan Trio recordings, and some radio broadcasts, and have never considered her as any other than an artist of the highest calibre. However, I said above that the piano parts in both of these works are relatively restrained; today, in Tomes's hands, they were positively self-effacing. Shostakovich himself played both piano parts, and while he may have been a discreet man, I don't think self-effacing would have fitted him very well. At any rate, it did no favours to either of these works, the piano is the glue that holds them together, and without strong representation there, no matter how clean and neat the playing is, the works tend to drift a little. There were several aspects of the first movement of the Trio, in particular, that just seemed to slip under the radar, and the quiet endings were more like running out of steam than being forcibly muted,
In consequence, the string players also seemed rather repressed, though there were some strong moments, such as Pei-Jee Ng in the slow movement of the Trio, or Tom Dunn in moments of the Quintet. Overall, however, this was a somewhat bloodless affair, and not as rewarding as hoped for.
[Next : 10th November]