12 Waltzes D145 - Schubert
Cello Sonata in F minor Op 99 - Brahms
Piano Trio in E flat D929 - Schubert
The third and penultimate concert of the National Concert Hall's Schubert/Brahms Festival brought fresh permutations of the players involved. John O'Conor opened the evening with a set of waltzes for solo piano. Matt Haimovitz and Philippe Cassard paired up for Brahms's stormy F minor Cello Sonata and, after the interval, Haimovitz was joined by Kurt Nikkanen and John O'Conor in the second of Schubert's Piano Trios.
These concerts present themselves as the celebratory bringing together of "friends and colleagues". But the evidence presented to the ear did not always betoken high levels of agreement between distinctive musical personalities.
Consistency of ensemble was a problem in the Schubert Trio and it was not always clear that a joint view on tempo had been reached by the players.
Nikkanen played with austere classical reserve, Haimovitz with more romantic excitability - balance-wise the latter tending to dominate over the former - and John O'Conor's loose fluidity at the keyboard, often with an excessive use of the sustaining pedal, effected little in the way of binding things together.
Haimovitz's excitability, uneven tone and sometimes unsweet intonation made a poor impression in the Brahms sonata. This was a pity, as Cassard was here the soul of consideration as a chamber music partner, and always in full expressive control of this demanding music.
Problems of ensemble and agreement of musical purpose obviously did not crop up in the opening item, John O'Conor's second 1997 offering of this particular dozen of Schubert Waltzes in a presentation which, however artful, hardly seemed to warrant such early recapitulation in the one venue.
