Moscow Piano Trio

{TABLE} Piano Trio in E flat, D929 ........ Schubert Piano Trio in A minor, Op 50 ...... Tchaikovsky {/TABLE} THE Piano Trio in E flat by Schubert, as played by the Moscow Piano Trio last Sunday, seemed larger than life. The Piano Trio in A minor by Tchaikovsky was made to seem orchestral in its dimensions.

The performances were not lacking in subtlety but what was most notable was their full bloodedness. The Russians were not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeve and certainly they made most performances outside the Russian tradition seem pallid in comparison.

One could better understand stories of Tolstoy weeping when he heard Tchaikovsky played and of Lenin refusing to listen to music because of the emotional disturbance it caused him.

Schubert had been approached through Tchaikovsky rather than through Haydn and was given an unaccustomed and not unwelcome grandeur which resounded throughout the great hall of the Royal Hospital.

With an ensemble of the stature of the Moscow Piano Trio, one was happy to be whelmed (Gerard Manley Hopkins's term) by the flow of the music, and one wondered whether classical music might not have a greater following if it were always performed with such emotional power and such musical expertise.

After the Schubert, the Tchaikovsky, for all its broadness of gesture and melodic appeal, could not help sounding a bit shallow, but that was not the fault of the ensemble, who played it with operatic intensity.