Trio Festivale

John Field Room, NCH, Dublin
Hummel – Trio in A, Op 78. Weber – Trio Op 63. Ian Wilson – Catalan Tales. Piazzolla – Oblivion. Martinu – Trio for Flute, Cello and Piano

THIS CONCERT was a small triumph in programming for uncommon forces.

The Irish-based Trio Festivale – here making its National Concert Hall debut in the John Field Room – comprises flute (Sabrina Hu), cello (Gerald Peregrine) and piano (Cathal Breslin), a combination whose standard repertoire is very limited.

That the concert improved as it went on seemed to me as much about the programming as the playing. From the opening bars of the Hummel trio the sound was always good – warm, sensitively balanced and flexible. But the piece is slight – really just a rather bland theme and seven common-or-garden variations – and the playing was a little too polite to make much of it.

This persisted in the Weber trio – a great staple for these instruments – whose grander, romantic gestures were somewhat diminished by playing which, while always nicely shaped and controlled, was confined to too narrow a dynamic range.

This all changed after the interval as the trio engaged with the intense and delicate sound-world of Ian Wilson’s 1996 Catalan Tales based on paintings by Miro. Originally for a string trio, the piece was recently reworked by Wilson for the present forces.

They played two movements: “Birds in space”, which surely benefited from the addition of flute, and “Dusk music”, with the three instruments bound together in gentle isorhythmic movement, flute and cello playing the same melody in different keys above soft clusters on the piano.

Coming as a complete contrast was Piazzolla’s Oblivion. It’s a short, sweetly melancholic little tango, beautifully arranged for flute trio and played with the kind of emotional engagement that was lacking in the Weber. You could almost sense the audience silently emitting a collective “aah”.

Their very best playing came in the sprightly Trio by Martinu. Into its soulful slow movement the trio imported the expressive depth which they had released in the Piazzolla, perfect foil to the high-spirits and humour of the two fast outer movements.

Alas, their encore was a version of Danny Boy with more cheese in it than the whole of Wisconsin.