Beaux Arts Trio - Shostakovich: Piano Trios Nos. 1 & 2 / 7 Romances on Verses by Alexander Blok (2005)

When the started life in 1955 in New York, its original members were Daniel Guilet, concertmaster of the NBC Symphony; Bernard Greenhouse, principal cello of the Columbia Symphony; and Menahem Pressler, an international piano virtuoso. When Guilet retired in 1969, the group added violinist Isidore Cohen from the Juilliard Quartet. This group's recordings of essentially the entire standard repertoire for piano trio made for Philips in the '70s and '80s established the with its full-bodied, big-hearted sound as the world's preeminent piano trio. The departures of Greenhouse in 1987 and Cohen in 1992 and the arrival of violinist Ida Kavafian and cellist Peter Wiley added a sharper, edgier tone to the group, but they left in 1998 and the group's edge went with them.
This incarnation of the has only one thing in common with its early incarnations: founding pianist Pressler. But joined by English violinist Daniel Hope and Brazilian cellist Antonio Meneses, Pressler is the foundation of what is in fact a wholly new group. It's hard to imagine what a Cohen/Greenhouse/Pressler recording of Shostakovich's two piano trios would sound like and harder to imagine that a Kavafian/Wiley/Pressler recording would sound anything like this Hope/Meneses/Pressler recording. The 's sound is much more than big-hearted -- it's intensely expressive -- and far less than sharp-edged -- it's lushly lyrical. In Shostakovich's First Trio, the new group's singing tone makes the work sound less early modernist than late romantic, while in his Second Trio, the group's expressivity makes the work seem less Socialist Realist than fin de siécle. With clear-toned English soprano Joanne Rogers, the new group turns in a powerfully moving -- and stylistically authentic -- performance of Shostakovich's late song cycle of Seven Romances on Verses by Alexander Blok.