Presburg Trio

{TABLE} Trio in G Hob XV: 14 ................. Haydn Flute Trio ........................... Martinu Flute Trio ........................... Ned Rorem Trio in U minor Op 63 ................ Weber {/TABLE} THE second concert of the National Concert Hall's "Young Platform Series" was given at the John Field Room on Monday by the Presburg Trio.

As this is a series devoted to "emerging young musicians" it may reasonably be assumed that the players involved are not yet well known. But the NCH's programme provided not a word of information on the musicians, let alone programme notes on the works played, or even the full dates of the composers and their works!

The Presburg Trio was formed earlier this year by Riona O Duinnin (flute), Claire Fitch (cello), and Owen Lorigan (piano). Pianist and flautist are both still students at the Royal Irish Academy of Music; the cellist, who hails from Birmingham, has been playing in the National Symphony Orchestra since last year. The group takes its name from the musically important Slovakian capital Bratislava, known in German as Pressburg (Presburg is, apparently, an old spelling), and in Hungarian as Pozsony (the city was capital of the kingdom of Hungary for nearly three centuries).

The group's programme began, appropriately enough, with works by composers from that general part of the world. Although Haydn's piano trios developed out of the accompanied keyboard sonata, the young players of the Presburg Trio chose to view the Trio in G of 1790 from a rather later perspective, and allotted undue prominence to both flute and cello. The outer movements were also threatened by dangerously fast speeds; it was the central Andante, with its more accompanimental role for the piano, that worked best.

Martinu's cheerful Trio was written in 1944 in the early years of this Czech composer's enforced American exile; the Presburgs handled it with suitable brio. The American Ned Rorem, a composer best known for his songs, wrote (or, rather, as he recorded in his diary, "painfully ejected") his Trio in 1960. The Presburgs essayed its colouristic writing with variable success and not without some moments of shaky ensemble.

By contrast, they responded with infectious enthusiasm to the warm romanticism of the Trio by Weber. It seemed entirely appropriate for it to be the youngest composer

(Weber was in his early thirties when he completed the work in 1819) whose music should prompt the performance which was most convincingly personal while at the same time stylistically apt.