Smiling through tears, crying through smiles, beauty in pain, it’s hard not to have that theme and its variations in your head when listening to Schubert’s late works, including the two piano trios he wrote in 1827, the year before he died. Even the First, with its freshness and humour, is habitually served up sounding, if not as though a spectre is actually waiting just off in the wings, then so slenderly early-Romantic of performance style as to nevertheless suggest, by default, that this is the fragile, fleeting pleasure of a young man who knows in his heart that the battle for life will soon be lost.
This was not, though, what London’s packed Wigmore Hall received from Nikolaj Sneps-Znaider, Gautier Capuçon and Rudolf Buchbinder on the penultimate leg of their Schubert trios tour. Fresh from Leipzig the previous evening, with just Luxembourg still to go, their First exploded with such power into the hall’s receptive acoustic that the balance took a few bars to settle. Big, bold, Romantic, generous, room-filling Schubert. And so it continued. Wonderfully.
This wasn’t the originally-billed line-up. The violinist’s chair was supposed to have been filled by Hilary Hahn, but with her still healing from a double pinched nerve, Capuçon’s brother Renaud had stepped in pre-Leipzig, then Szeps-Znaider for the remainder. Perhaps this newness contributed to the sheer enthusiasm and sense of occasion emanating off the stage. Either way, this was amiably, convivially complicit musical conversation, Szeps-Znaider and Capuçon facially beckoning each other into each new mood or dynamic, while leaning constantly, intently in towards twinkly-eyed Buchbinder, apparently as reverently chuffed to be there with this mostly Austria-based piano statesman as the audience was at this rare London appearance. Buchbinder meanwhile was so unassuming that for the First Trio he remained slightly behind in the balance: thoroughly present; indeed ravishingly so, with his utterly natural-sounding lyric shaping, golden bloom and quicksilver dexterity; yet essentially deferential to the strings powerhouse, as though wary of the Wigmore piano’s capacity to dominate.
What thus struck after the interval with the Second Trio was what an absolutely perfectly weighted conversation it instantly was. The three jostling voices just sang and fizzed in the ears. So while the First hadn’t been short on magic, as complete symbiosis was achieved, it now came thick and fast, from the deft balancing act between rhythmic crispness and flexibility, to the many moments at which the strings’ tones and phrasing suddenly locked, blended and produced a glow that felt ten times the sum of its parts. The Andante con moto took the breath away: Buchbinder’s steadily flowing, Winterreise-y trudge; Capuçon’s legato cello song opening achingly numbly beautiful, then gradually taking on more emotion; a searing central storm, the piano chords suddenly brittle-toned, and that of the strings similarly hardening into wild despair; then as the end approached, bottom Cs from Capuçon of a bleak, deep, hollow width you could drop a house into. Kaleidoscopic tonal colouring which hit mark, after mark, after mark.
But while that funeral march cut deep, these ultimately were readings that made one wonder at how a man whose short life had been so full of disappointment and physical affliction, could have the inner reserves to be able to write such joyous, pleasure-giving, open-hearted, strong music. Not strength through weakness, but strength instead of weakness. No wonder the hall roared its approval after both trios, and equally after the final merrily lickedy-split encore – the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio no. 1. “I was going to tell a joke, but I got censored!” quipped Szeps-Znaider as he introduced it, cocking his head towards Buchbinder. Whatever the truth of that, no jokes were needed in the face of such life-affirming playing.
