Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Piano Trio no. 2 in C major, Op.87

Yo-Yo Ma, Emmanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos hold a sold-out Royal Albert Hall to rapt attention for some astonishing chamber music. 

Some chamber concerts, like this one at Snape Maltings, can turn a public hall into a large drawing room. 

Renaud Capuçon brings his customary taste, refinement and intellect to music he has played many times over the years with a variety of partners – here Julia Hagen and Igor Levit. 

Festivals and academies breed familiarity and mutual compassion between audiences and returning artists. Yet the warmly informal feel of this concert owed mostly to the close relationships between the musicians themselves.

After tumbling deliriously to the end, if they had played one of Brahms' Hungarian Dances as an encore, they would have had them the audience dancing in the aisles.

All three of these musicians are virtuosic soloists in their own right, but here they became far more than the sum of their parts – graceful, poised, and sensitive.

This concert was a wonderful way to spend a Sunday morning. It was the first of the Sitkovetsky Piano Trio’s coffee-morning concerts – “Coffee Classics” – in which they gave a passion-fuelled performance of Brahms’ Piano Trio no. 2 in C major, and Smetena’s Piano Trio in G minor.