Leonore Piano Trio: effortlessly impeccable in Haydn, Beethoven and Schumann in Sheffield

Music by Haydn often opens concert programmes – whether a symphony, a string quartet or, as here, a piano trio – functioning, for both performers and audience, as a kind of amuse-bouche before the main fare for the evening. That was definitely not the case in this exceptional recital by the Leonore Piano Trio, the seventh in their continuing series here in Sheffield titled ‘Romantic Piano Trios’. Just how ‘Romantic’ Haydn’s Piano Trio no. 44 in E major and Beethoven’s Piano Trio in G major, Op.1 no.2, actually are is open to debate, but with playing this committed, such a quibble seems irrelevant. 

The Haydn is an astonishing piece, even by his endlessly creative standards, from its arresting opening to the far-reaching harmonic journey of its finale, but it’s the slow Allegretto that brings one up short. It’s a little like a Baroque trio sonata movement crossed with a composition by the Modern Jazz Quartet. Its sinuous and meandering ‘walking bass’, full of chromatic inflections, almost but not quite a passacaglia, underpins a spare, moody piano melody. It was played perhaps a touch more briskly by the Leonores than it might have been, but it illustrated perfectly their unanimity of approach.

This trio have been together now for twelve years (indeed, longer than that in terms of their membership of the wider Ensemble 360) and watching them in action you can see how each of them anticipates and responds to the others’ playing intuitively and with great empathy for the music’s demands. This quality was very evident in the early Beethoven trio. The first movement glowed with affable good humour. Yet here again it was the slow movement that touched the heights, with both Benjamin Nabarro (violin) and Gemma Rosefield (cello) making the most of the movement’s Largo con espressione marking, by turns rapt and tender in their slowly-unfolding lyrical lines. If Mozart at his most song-like stands behind this movement, the Leonores showed how Beethoven developed this sound world into something more evidently ‘Romantic’. The performance generated a deserved ovation, particularly after its rollicking, helter-skelter finale, all three players throwing themselves into its bubbling, mock-dramatic feints and turns.

The one indisputably ‘Romantic’ work on the programme was Schumann’s Piano Trio no.1 in D minor. Schumann’s chamber music, the Piano Quartet and Piano Quintet aside, rarely gets star billing in concerts, but with playing like this it deserved its place as the culminating work of a compelling evening’s music-making. It’s a dark, brooding composition, even though it ends with a joyously celebratory finale. The performers got convincingly inside the shifting moods of its opening movement, from the swirling piano figuration of its restless opening to that weirdly haunting passage in the central development in which both violin and cello play sul ponticello. 

The relatively untroubled Scherzo-like second movement showed the extent of Schumann’s study of Bach, with its neat canonic patterns, but its playful ingenuity gave way with startling effect to the slow movement which – yet again – provided the work’s emotional core. Pianist Tim Horton pointed out earlier the essential untranslatability of the marking mit inniger Empfindung, but the music’s intense ‘inwardness’ was evident to all in this deeply tragic movement, played here with passionate restraint. After that, the fiery finale roared away to its euphoric climax, a perfect conclusion to the evening, though we didn’t leave without a touch more Haydn, the Presto finale of the Piano Trio no. 43 forming a giddily affirmative encore.