Restoriation - The Serafino Trio plays Foot's Opus 5 Trio

After hearing so many amateurish, and less, performances on MP3, the
opening moments of the Serafino trio's selection came as a physical blow.
The order, the precision and the grace that one has a right to expect from
professional musicians was there.  The difference between people trying to
make music, and musicians making music is so dramatic, that to reach up can
make one giddy, and to fall afterwards can feel as if thrown from a cliff.

Consequently I began the track a new so that the specific musica details
of the performance, rather than the drama of the ontrast, could be felt.

Foote was not a great composer.  However, standing in the shadow of
Johannes Brahms - that great musical organiser - he could craft with
a felicity which is the hallmakr of the talented acting within their
limitations.  And the Piano Trio - being among the most constrained
of genres allows a composer to do this most easily.

The constraint of the form produces a particular trait that is of value
here more thna any other part of the reprtory - graceful courteousness.
The piano is easily able to overwheelm the two other instruments, and they
other two are seldom given, and cannot regularly be given, virtuoso passage
work to compensate for being very small bits of wood engaged against a
battleship with guns of steel.  This is why the Beaux Arts Trio and trios
with that most courteous ofpianists, Emmanuel Ax, are the most sought
after.  It is this quality of carefully and finely choreougraphed grace
that makes the shape of the work appearant.  Each instrument must, like a
dancer, thread their way through this dance, and it must seem effortless.
The same quality which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers gave us.

It is a quality - for all of their skill - that some younger trios lack.
It is a quality which the serafino trio has in goodly measure, and which
consequently makes their performance of Foote's trio ake it seem better
than it actually is.  The piano, so often filling in the spaces between
Foote's melodic ideas, ideas which never quite draw the last ounce of
strength from their chord progressions, is the key to much of this.
Foote is writing in Brahms' vocabulary, the normal habits of emphasis
would overwhelm Foote, because he is not always aware of the force that
he conjures with.  Left out entirely, and we would have staleness.  But
here Ms.  Bradbury gives us - understatement - understatement without
irony.  This is crucial.  It is crucial because understatement with irony
would mock Foote, torment his passages for not finding the more elegant
contrapunctal solution, giggle over his leaving out more dissonant
expansions to the chord progression.  Understatemetn with irony would, in
otherwords, be delicious pleasure for a few, and seem grotesque to most.
Understatement without irony allows us to hear how foote labor in the
garden to produce fluidity of movement, even rising and falling of the
piano line so that it elegantly crosses over its partners in a very refined
dance, and the pleasure of watching this refnement is akin to the joy one
takes at seeing finely detailed carving work in an old stair case or on an
old chest.  No one would spend such time and care, adn few are trained to
be able to do so.

What makes the performance avoid archaic mustiness comes from the string.
Their string technqiue is wholy modern, gone are the glissandos and
vibratos that Foote's world would have expected from them, no where present
are the long hanging fermatas which a Liszt lead trio might have added in.
This spareness gives the movement of the trio a certain rush, a certain
hurriedness.  To raise up the dancing analogy oncemore -we are not watching
couples Waltz in 1905, we are watching ball room dancers tkae those same
steps to the showroom in 1995.  They are aware of what comes after -
Schostakovich is waiting in the wings behind this playing.  Runions takin
g of the second theme is much closer to the approach that one would find
favored in the Schostakovich Trio #3, with its self-conscious neo-classical
bent.

With a cohesive ensemble the result is a performance of this particular
work which, while it may not be *better* in the sense of technical mastery
and hair raising fingerings, is *more satisfying* than any other.  It
is without the leaden Englishness of several other performances out of
Britian, it is without the blockiness that others leave Foote with.  It is
with the same care that others might only lavish on works they know to be
great.  It is a restoration, leaving us with wood which is stained to a
lighter hue than before, and retouched with varnish, and shining brightly
under a new sun.

Stirling S Newberry
Mp3s: http://www.mp3.com/ssn
War and Romance Radio: http://stations.mp3s.com/stations/8/war_and_romance.html