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Music

Marlboro Trio Spices Old Chamber Music

By TERI TOWE

Musicianship of the highest
order was very much in
evidence in Cabell Hall
Auditorium on Tuesday when
the Marlboro Trio presented a
group of rarely performed
piano trios by Hayden, Ives,
and Mendelssohn. The trio's
members, Mitchell Andrews,
pianist, Gerald Tarack,
violinist, and Charles
McCracken, cellist, are all
highly respected as soloists,
and, although I had not heard
the Marlboro Trio before
Tuesday evening, I remember
being greatly impressed by the
playing of Mr. Tarack and Mr.
McCracken I heard at some of
Alexander Scheider's chamber
music concerts in New York in
recent years.

The Marlboro Trio's
approach to the performance
and the interpretation of
Chamber music is very much in
the tradition of the legendary
Cortot, Thibaud, Casals Trio;
with whom they have much in
common-a warm engaging
tone; judicious choice of
tempt; vigorous and
spontaneous though carefully
thought out interpretations
and that natural rapport with
one another and with the
repertoire that is the hallmark
of all great chamber ensembles.

The concert opened with a
spirited and stylistically
traditional reading of Franz
Josef Hayden's rarely played
Piano Trio in C Major, H. IV
27. The interpretation was
vigorous and rather romantic,
with no attempt to create the
more intimate sound of the
softer and more plangent
instruments of Hayden's day.

Next came a performance of
Charles Ives's eccentric and
highly original Piano Trio. Said
to have been inspired by the
composer's undergraduate
experiences at Yale, the second
movement, marked Tsiai, an
acrostic for "This scherzo is a
joke", and the last movement
are replete with quotations
from such popular hymns,
ballads, and college songs as
Bringing in the Sheaves,
Marching through Georgia, and
Bulldog, Bulldog, Bow Wow
Wow, Eli Yale. The Marlboro
Trio played the work with the
requisite tongue-in-cheek
seriousness, never permitting
the almost insurmountable
technical difficulties stand in
the way of their interpretation.

The second half of the
concert was given to a splendid
reading of Felix
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's
unjustly neglected Piano Trio
No. 2 in C Minor, Opus 66, a
composition that spiritually has
much in common with the
often played Piano Quintet in
E Flat Major, Opus 44 of
Mendelssohn's contemporary,
Robert Schumann. The
opening allegro energico e con
fuoco could have done with
more "bite", perhaps, but the
somewhat restrained approach
to the movement was in
keeping with the Marlboro

Trio's decision to emphasize
the warmth in the score rather
than the occasional outbursts
of emotion and passion, a view
consistent with what is known
of Mendelssohn's personality.

The Marlboro. Trio has
appeared in Charlottesville
before to great acclaim, and
the enthusiastic response which
they received from their
audience is a more than gentle
hint to the Board of Directors
of the Tuesday Evening
Concert Series to invite them
to return here soon.