An account from emigre Russians of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio as moving as any and generally as finely played. Not that Western ensembles, such as the Beaux Arts, aren’t equally capable of connecting with the Trio’s frank and deeply felt elegy, but Russian ones are more given to emote openly (and make Russian connections; listening to this performance, I was struck more than usual by pre-echoes of Shostakovich). Choice of tempo ranges widely, but not, to my ears, excessively, the Bekovas imaginatively drawing on what is there – the dreaming of the second movement’s ninth variation is very affectingly done, making a delightful contrast with the following capricious mazurka variation. Unusually, the Trio is given without the cuts in this (probably overlong) second movement of the fugal eighth variation and a large chunk of the finale, and it is only momentarily in the latter’s high-speed Russian dance that one senses the business of getting round the notes as an obstacle to an ideally spirited delivery (maybe a fractionally slower tempo would have helped). As to the oft-encountered problems of instrumental balance in this piece, somehow they seem to sort themselves out, for which credit is due – equally, I suspect – to the pianist’s awareness that it is all too easy to dominate in this piece, to the engineering (not as reverberant as you might be expecting from this source, but intimate and mellow in exactly the right proportions), and to the fact that it is the kind of performance that invites you to engage with it more on an expressive level than on an analytical one.
And Tchaikovsky’s only chamber offspring for piano and strings is here joined by a kind of half-sister. This isn’t the first complete arrangement made of Tchaikovsky’s piano-only originals of The Seasons, but it is the first, as far as I know, for piano trio, and as such, an arrangement that retains the fundamental drawing-room intimacy and gentle virtues of the originals (unlike Alexander Gauk’s for orchestra). My worries here have nothing to do with the arrangements, which are sensitively and imaginatively done, but with the performance itself which is inclined, a little too often for through-listening, to lapse into slow-motion melancholy musing (following the Shrovetide Fair of ‘February’, we have to wait four months for any kind of vigour to return to the proceedings, not literally, obviously, but it might seem like that!). Nevertheless, it is always a very beautiful melancholy musing, and if you are tempted, Chandos is offering the whole package at mid price. '