Trio in G, K564 - Mozart
Trio in D minor, Op 63 - Schumann
Trio in B, Op 8 - Brahms
The Hungarian violinist Gabor Takacs-Nagy was a founder-member and longtime leader of the Takacs Quartet and, from the late 1970s, was among the most frequent and much-loved chamber-music visitors to Ireland.
Some years back, health problems forced him to leave the quartet, but he is now active again, combining his post as leader of the Budapest Festival Orchestra with membership of the Takacs Piano Trio and teaching responsibilities in a number of European centres.
The Piano Trio ended its debut tour of Ireland on Sunday with a programme of Mozart, Schumann and Brahms in the President's Hall of the Law Society in Blackhall Place. Mozart has never been a composer with whom Takacs-Nagy has seemed fully at ease. He seems spurred to interventionist shaping, which can cause phrases to veer out of proportion, sometimes to the point of sounding downright fidgety.
The fresh sense of clarity and focus at the very opening of Schumann's D minor Trio was evidence of an altogether finer response in music of the romantic period. The violinist and his two colleagues, Denes Varjon (piano) and Peter Szabo (cello), have that alertness of imagination, ready lyricism and spark of fire to respond to Schumann's shifting moods, and Varjon showed himself particularly sensitive to the light-toned management of the composer's insistently filled-out piano writing.
Brahms's Trio in B was his first chamber work, but is nowadays heard in a thorough-going revision carried out in the last decade of his life. The Takacs' performance thrived on a sense of youthful thrust - the fleetness of the Scherzo was a particular delight - though in the balance of the three instruments the cello sometimes seemed a shade reticent. This was remedied in the encore, the slow movement from Mendelssohn's D minor Trio, sweet, songful, and floated with touching delicacy.
