Trio Gaspard. Lakeside, Nottingham, 09 November, 2023.

4****: William Ruff.

Trio Gaspard is a piano trio, a term which is something of a classical minefield. It sounds as if it should mean three pianos, but it doesn’t. Instead it’s a piano plus violin and cello. Thursday night’s Lakeside concert showed that, although all classical piano trios are equal, some are more equal than others.

Haydn (in the 18th century) wrote more piano trios than anyone else – but his are more like piano sonatas with the violin and cello as also-rans who decorate and accompany but don’t have much independence (or indeed any). This doesn’t mean to say, of course, that the Haydn piano trio isn’t a thing of joy. Trio Gaspard (whose members come from Germany, Greece and the UK) know this more than most musicians because they are currently recording all 43 of them to great critical acclaim.

On Thursday they played two, Nos 22 and 25 with all the wit, elegance and sparkle that anyone could wish for. No 25 has a particularly charming slow movement and the Gaspards handled its elaborate decorations with transparency and aplomb, its concluding Rondo having much character as well as brilliance. In No 22 Haydn comes as close as he ever does to putting the strings on an equal footing with the piano, as if slowly freeing himself from the tradition that said that the keyboard player had to call all the shots.

In between the two Haydn trios came the Elegy by Dvorak’s son-in-law Josef Suk, a poignantly beautiful work inspired by the ancient fortress perched on a rock overlooking the river in Prague. It’s a piece of rich lyricism, yearning phrases, passionate interruptions and a peaceful conclusion.

By the time Dvorak himself (a hundred years after Haydn) wrote his ‘Dumky’ Piano Trio, the three instruments had become equal partners. ‘Dumky’ is the plural of ‘dumka’, originally a song brooding over heroic deeds of bygone days. Out of this Dvorak created a new musical form: a piece which starts in brooding, melancholy fashion before breaking into a lively dance. His ‘Dumky’ Trio consists of six of these and it has become one of his most popular chamber works. This performance by Trio Gaspard made it easy to see why. You need both intense seriousness and a carefree lightness of touch to do justice to the individual movements as well as to the shape of the whole thing. A striking feature of their performance was the ease with which the sharply contrasted moods emerged and melody was allowed to blossom.

This attractive programme occasionally presented tricky problems of balancing two string instruments against a modern Steinway grand and whether you felt that they were completely solved may have depended on where in the hall you were sitting. However, there was much audience enthusiasm, rewarded by an encore: an ingenious, virtuosic homage to Haydn, specially commissioned by pianist and composer Kit Armstrong and receiving its UK premiere.

Trio Gaspard

Jonian Ilias Kadesha – violin, Vashti Hunter – cello, Nicholas Rimmer - piano