Mendelssohn: Piano Trios album review – celebrity soloists are a balanced delight

There’s something about the combination of piano, violin and cello that seems to attract ad hoc celebrity collaborations, bringing soloists together just for the fun of playing chamber music. The idea probably began in 1949 with the formation of the “Million Dollar Trio” – pianist Arthur Rubinstein, violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky – who gave a few concerts together and made some recordings for RCA before it all ended in tears, while in the 1970s Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman and Jacqueline du Pré recorded the Beethoven trios. More recently Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma have worked together in concert and in the studio, and now we have Jeremy Denk teaming up with Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis for these very convincing accounts of Mendelssohn’s two piano trios, the D minor Op 49 and C minor Op 66, not only among the composer’s finest chamber works, but two of the finest trios in the repertory.

What is clear throughout these performances is that this is real chamber music; there’s never any sense of one player trying to dominate his colleagues or to hog the limelight. Their approach is defined by Isserlis’s soft-grained cello line in the opening bars of the D minor trio. It’s a work that, like the hyperactive C minor trio, could easily become overwrought, but here dynamism is perfectly balanced with subtlety; the delicacy and precision of the playing in the first movement of the C minor trio is a delight, though there’s no shortage of sheer power when it’s really needed.

Listen on Apple Music (above) or on Spotify