This coupling, or similar
permutations of it, has become increasingly
popular over the last few years. The
Second Trio and Blok songs featured
on a Chandos disc coupled with the Viola
Sonata – played, weirdly, on the cello
– by the Bekova Sisters Trio. The Blok
songs featured Joan Rodgers, one of
the most idiomatic of all non-Russian
singers of the language but the instrumental
support was less than stellar in the
accompanying works and the performance
of the Trio was not especially convincing.
The Stockholm Arts Trio on Naxos 8.553297,
however, exactly duplicates this Arco
Diva release in presenting both trios
and the Blok settings.
With regard to the
Op.67 trio the historic catalogue tends
to be dominated by the members of the
Borodin Quartet, both the Kopelman-Berlinsky-Leonskaja
disc on WPCS and the1983 Chandos disc
with the Dubinsky-Turovsky-Edlina trio.
Further back we have two recordings
with Shostakovich himself – the famous
1947 set recorded in Prague with Oistrakh
and Sádlo and the slightly earlier
Russian made traversal with Tsiganov
and Shirinsky joining the composer.
The former has been released on CD by
Revelation and LYS, and the latter on
Revelation. There’s firm competition
then in this repertoire even though,
disconcertingly, things come and go
in this repertoire and what seems likes
riches one week seems like a desert
the next.
The first thing to
say about the young Czech Artemiss trio
– I sense a pun at work since all three
are young women – is that their recording
of the great Second Trio has character.
The opening, with its high lying and
difficult shifts for the violinist,
has certainly sounded more confident
and fluent on disc, and in the main
the trio is quite reserved and measured.
Better this I think than some smeary
sentimentalising such as the Bekovas
dished up from time to time in their
disc. The obverse is a lack of tonal
heft and a certain lack of sweep in
the opening movement. There’s precise
but not over fleet articulation in the
second movement though they do tend
to colour certain phrases a touch melodramatically.
In the third movement passacaglia there’s
some leonine piano chording but they
keep the string temperature low with
few obvious emotive gestures. This is
in contrast to Oistrakh et al
whose subtle infusions of colour were
comprehensive in their responses. Performances
of this work tend to shy away from the
extremes of tempo one can hear in Shostakovich’s
own two recordings; these have only
been approached in my experience by
the Leonid Kogan-led performance. This
is particularly true of the finale.
I know Shostakovich told Yakov Milkis
to do as he felt in this work but the
whole character of the work changes
when the bite is as passionate as it
is in the 1947 recording with Oistrakh.
The more measured approach of the Artemiss
Trio is however fairly usual now and
I think tends to desensitise the movement.
The early Op.8 Trio
is a late romantic work of considerable
concision. At shy of thirteen minutes
in this performance it registers its
gestures with precision and accuracy.
The Artemiss threesome bring a cool
eye to bear on the more elegiac moments
but are good with the romanticised tread,
bringing out the lyricism without exaggeration.
The Blok songs have been slower to enter
the bloodstream of the concert and recorded
repertoire. The young soprano Alžběta
Poláčková is at her best in the
lighter, folk inflected moments of the
fourth setting or the earlier parts
of the last, a setting of the poem Music.
The high tessitura can cause some
problems in Gamayun,
the second song, though Poláčková
manages quite well given that
the voice sounds to be quite light in
size. She certainly doesn’t have the
obvious Wagnerian heft of Anita Soldh
on the Naxos disc, but that’s not necessarily
a bad thing though she doesn’t as yet
possess Vishnevskaya’s command of texture
and range.
I hope this sort of
coupling will become more popular and
that a disc such as this will stay long
in the catalogue. We can certainly do
without the deletions axe in this repertoire.
The performances as I’ve suggested are
rather reserved and analytical but the
recorded sound is attractive and the
notes quite adequate.
Jonathan Woolf
I hope this sort of
coupling will become more popular and
that a disc such as this will stay long
in the catalogue. Performances here
are rather reserved and analytical but
the recorded sound is attractive ...
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Artemiss Piano Trio 
