Performance: Ogen Trio

School of Music

Review: Tara Werner

The period just after Robert Schumann was taken to an asylum was a particularly difficult time for his wife Clara. She took solace in her friends, and there were long candlelit evenings where she and Brahms would alternate at the piano before a close-knit group of listeners.

They took turns trying out a draft of his new B Major Trio, a work that Clara felt was uneven due to its constant changes in tempo. Brahms took her at her word and withdrew the score, revising it substantially a number of years later.

It was this more streamlined version that the Ogen Trio performed so sensitively in Sunday's concert.

The three (Katherine Austin, piano, Dimitri Atanassov, violin, and James Tennant, cello) have a mellow yet forceful approach that was quite suitable for the composer's Trio Op 8.

While Austin struggled at times with her difficult piano part, all four movements were performed with an impassioned interpretation quite appropriate to the circumstances in which it was written.

In comparison, the other works on the programme did not have quite the directness of the Brahms, but this was not the fault of the musicians.

Pieces by Debussy, Janacek and David Farquhar all seemed to have an enigmatic quality.

Debussy's mercurial Sonata for Cello and Piano was just that - mercurial, with both Tennant and Austin performing the lightning shifts of mood with elan, although Tennant's penchant for heavy breathing was a distraction.

New Zealand composer David Farquhar's Piano Trio Woven Strands, a rather introspective work, did not appear to be going anywhere, although the second movement seemed more coherent.

And Janacek's slightly overblown style was characterised in his Sonata for Violin and Piano, written just before the First World War and full of passionate themes.

Both Austin and Atanassov made short work of the technical problems.

The piece de resistance turned out to be the encore - the pounding Scherzo from Gareth Farr's Piano Trio Ahi.