{Table} Trio in E, K542 .............................. Mozart
Trio No, 3 in C minor Op 101 ................. Brahms
Phantasy Trio ................................ Joan Trimble
Trio No, 1 in D minor, Op 32 ................. Arensky {/Table} THE Coach House in Dublin Castle once stabled 16 horses with room to spare but the audience that assembled for the London Mozart Trio's recital last Thursday had to be tightly packed and the space was too small for the volume of sound created by the instrumentalists, the pianist in particular.
The big sound and the pressurised style of playing suited the grand gestures of Brahms's Trio and a marked rhythmic elan kept the work on its toes so that it never seemed overweight. Mozart's Trio KS 42, however, suffered from an approach which pressed the music too hard instead of allowing it to speak through its own gentleness.
Joan Trimble's Phantasy Trio, which won the Cobbet Prize for chamber music in 1940, is a more delicate work than Thursday's performance might lead one to think and its blend of Irish melodic inflections and European compositional techniques need careful handling its appeal is not helped by overstatement.
Arenskys Trio No.1, with its hints of Borodin, Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky, is a study work and there were delightful moments, but here again a lighter touch would have allowed for more charm and would have been easier on the ears, certainly in the so called Coach House.
