Brotherly love embraces Vienna's rich heritage

The Eggner Trio are proud of their link with the past.

Concert FM is increasingly bringing us live broadcasts from Australia and one of the best was last October's Sydney concert by the Eggner Trio.

ABC presenter Marian Arnold was impressed, and not only with what she was hearing from these "three very good looking young men with unbuttoned shirts and no ties".

These were musicians who looked "nice and modern", Arnold cooed, "not at all stiff and starchy".

After the Eggner's visceral performance of Beethoven's Ghost Trio, she was smitten by the cellist's "endearing habit of kicking his left heel right up in the air at moments of great passion".

Auckland audiences will be able to catch this Austrian trio tomorrow night and see whether they live up to Chamber Music New Zealand's description of them as "three young handsome brothers famed for musically impassioned togetherness".

When I catch up with the pianist, Christoph Eggner, his voice has the lilt of a Schubert Landler folk-musician.

The Eggners have been playing together "since ever", Christof Eggner says. "We just waited until our youngest brother, Florian, was 11 and capable of playing Haydn trios."

Moving to Vienna, the Eggners focused on chamber music. They had coaching from the best, including Juir Smirnov of the Vienna Brahms Trio who, Eggner says, "provided us with a solid base as a trio, which left us free to explore other styles of music".

Tradition was all around them. Teachers traced their lineage back to the times of Liszt and Brahms.

"One of our big responsibilities," Eggner says, "has been to create a musical road back into the 19th century."

A road which, it seems, leads firmly to Vienna. If you listen to the music that was composed in Vienna during the 18th and 19th centuries, it was quite different to that of Germany.

"Vienna has always had a special atmosphere in the arts and, unlike Germany, was always more open to outside influences. That was the reason Beethoven and Brahms moved from Germany to Vienna." Tomorrow night's concert opens with Mozart's B flat major Trio K 502 and Eggner is coy about its appeal.

"If you ask a pianist, then you will get the answer of a pianist," he says. "The second movement is like the slow movement of a piano concerto and I introduce the main theme solo before the strings come in."

But surely brother Georg gets his share of the tunes? "Yes, the violin has lovely moments, but it always plays after the piano."

We laugh, but only briefly - this is a man for whom ensemble is all.

Eggner emphasises the importance of every single note in tomorrow night's Brahms' C minor Trio, "the shortest and most difficult of them all".

Of the Finale of the Shostakovich E minor Trio, he says: "It's incredibly wild and if you break the strings and ruin the piano then you have played it well."

This must have been the combination of virtuosity and ensemble that led to the Eggner Trio's success at the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition in 2003, a win that led to extensive European tours and an upcoming CD.

The repertoire listed on their website is a tad conservative.

The only recent name is Werner Pirchner, an Austrian jazzman who turned to classical composition. "We are so lucky to play Werner's music," Eggner says. "He mixes up all the folk and jazz influences into his own style and writes music everyone understands immediately."

I am curious whether tomorrow's encore might give us a taste of Pirchner's appeal. "You can read our thoughts," Eggner says. "We have already prepared something."

* The Eggner Trio at Auckland Town Hall, tomorrow, 8pm