{TABLE} Trio in B flat D581.............................Schubert String Trio.....................................Kevin O'Connell Adagio and Fugue in D minor K4O4a No 1..........Mozart Trio a cordes...................................Cras {/TABLE} THERE'S been a burst of interest this year in Kevin O'Connell's 10-year-old String Trio, started by the Hibernia String Trio and now taken up on a Music Network tour by the Offenburger String Trio. By the end of the month, the year's count of performances will be close on 15.
The composer introduced the Offenburger's performance at the opening of their tour at the County Museum, Dundalk, on Thursday. In approaching the medium, he seems to have been less concerned to think about the masterpieces it has, spawned (among them, the E flat Divertimento by Mozart and the late Trio by Schoenberg), than with the limitations which seem to have steered composers towards more malleable instrumental groupings.
The six-movement piece he produced is, in effect, a very single-minded set of studies - take your idea, put it in position, and let it run. The dominant feeling is of raw vigour. I was reminded not so much of anything in the string trio repertoire as of Stravinsky's Three Pieces for String Quartet, with which O'Connell's trio shares a certain obsessive sharpness.
The O'Connell was the high point of the Offenburger's programme. The opening Schubert was bedevilled by contortionist elasticities of rhythm and ensemble which radically distorted (and never to its advantage) the true shape of the music.
The Mozart, an arrangement of a Bach fugue with a fresh introduction, was not always comfortable. The closing work by Jean Cras (1879-1932) had an engagingly, loose, almost free-wheeling style, that on first hearing seemed stronger in manner than matter.
