The Hartley Piano Trio have followed their discs of British and Czech piano trios (also on Gamut Classics, 9/91) with this admirably chosen American selection. They are an excellent ensemble, well balanced, invariably musical and utterly satisfying to listen to in all the styles represented here. Well recorded too.
Amy Beach wrote her romantic Trio in A minor as late as 1938, sticking to her guns as if the nineteenth century had never ended. Alan Feinberg (January, page 26) said it can be a kind of bogus discrimination to call conservative American (and British?) composers merely derivative when that sort of influence from one generation to the next has always been perfectly normal and accepted within the Austro-German tradition. He could be right and by implication we tend to prefer the American pioneers, although the record catalogue now has plenty of each.
Amy Beach certainly has polish in that her slow movement could have come from European conservatives such as Elgar or Rachmaninov and there is only an occasional syncopation in the finale to ruffle her Boston decorum. This elegant performance brings out the same quality in Beach's music.
Quite different is the Trio by Ives, a rarely heard substantial piece, and Ives set great store by substance. It has to be reckoned with alongside his two string quartets. The joke Scherzo is a crazy melange of superimposed quotations and the extended finale ends memorably, saturated with hymn-tune references of a kind that could only have come from Ives. The performance is just as sympathetic and idiomatic as the Beach—two parallel routes to genuine musical discovery.
The more familiar Copland is a further contrast, with his characteristic hard-edged sound of the late 1920s and less familiar quarter-tones. The sound is clean and harsh with some very nifty passagework from all three players in the Allegro.
Bloch's Three Nocturnes are mellifluous rarities, in recognizably his own emotional territory, and the Cowell Trio, with a different combination of instruments for each movement, finally brings all three players together with a movement of real serenity.'