The jewels in the crowns of various summer classical music and opera festivals – from Aix to Lucerne to Tanglewood – are their academies. Stars in the making promise to confer prestige on the institutions that launch them, while such musical incubators provide a steady flow of talent to be harnessed for future programmes. The Tsinandali Festival, the Georgian heir to Switzerland's Verbier Festival, has therefore made a smart move by setting up its own academy for its inaugural edition. As if the enterprise's backers needed reassuring of the wisdom of their investment, here was a concert from an illustrious trio of which two-thirds had come through the Verbier Festival Academy’s ranks.
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. The violinist Renaud Capuçon has partnered pianist Nicholas Angelich since the start of his professional career. Edgar Moreau, the 25-year-old cellist that burst onto the scene after winning the 2009 Rostropovich and coming second in the 2011 Tchaikovsky competitions, is a more recent but by now stable member of the gang.
Together they were beautifully poised. Capuçon's violin is sweet and lithe, Moreau's cello nutty and lively; the naturalness and joy with which they communicated onstage was infectious. But in Mendelssohn's Piano Trio no. 1 in D minor it is the piano that gets the lion's share of the sparkling music, and Angelich's was a lush yet contained sound that wrapped a comforting embrace around the two string players. As Moreau and Capuçon passed the sunny cantabile theme in the opening movement between themselves, Angelich stepped out of the glittering shadows of his creation to gently sweep it up, the cheerily whistling theme fading almost imperceptibly into windswept romanticism. A captivating journey as invigorating as it was meditative.