KEY POINTS:
What: Eggner Trio
Where: Auckland Town Hall
Perhaps the single most pleasing thing about the Eggner Trio's Tuesday concert was that the audience seemed to be larger than is usual for Chamber Music New Zealand.
Frankly, it is about time Aucklanders were aware of the superlative quality of CMNZ's programme; they bring us world-class artists and, for a couple of hours, without excessive wallet damage, we could imagine ourselves transported to a capacious version of Wigmore Hall.
So it was when Georg, Florian and Christoph Eggner introduced themselves with the first seductive lines of Beethoven's Opus 70 No 2. It was every bit as sweet as Beethoven requests and the propulsive energy a few lines ahead was all the more dramatic; Christoph Eggner's punched-out offbeats flew like sparks from a winter fire.
In the more outgoing passages of the Allegretto, the three men achieved an impressive solidity of sound without sacrificing grace, and revelled in the piquant colorations of the Schubertian third movement.
John Psathas' Island Songs is 13 years old and sounding as fresh as if it were a newly hatched commission. Tackling the first with its beguiling accent play, the Eggners made one realise just how invigorating this music seemed in the mid-90s, how bracing the clangour of its climax.
The controlled tentativeness of the second movement obviously appealed to the Austrian musicians as they delved into its rhythmic complexities. The finale was merciless in its dynamism; here was the equivalent of a Greek dervish dance.
After interval, Brahms' B major Trio was a journey to chamber music heaven. Florian Eggner had described it to me as symphonic and, although the men had a total grasp of its formal structure, they played it with a wonderful lightness and tonal flexibility; even the trickiest metre changes had a winning naturalness.
The Scherzo was as will-o'-the-wisp as it should be, while the Adagio, one of the composer's loveliest, allowed us to appreciate the extraordinary bonding between violin and cello in this musicianly brotherhood.
For an encore we were given a gorgeously poetic account of a Schumann piece with the most unpoetic of titles - the last of his Six Pieces in Canonic Form.
