United States Haydn, Shostakovich, Mendelssohn: Wu Han (piano), Arnaud Sussmann (violin), David Finckel (cello). Cal Performances, Hertz Hall, University of California Berkeley, 9.2.2025. (HS)
Haydn – Piano Trio in E major, Hob.XV.28
Shostakovich – Piano Trio No.2 in E minor, Op.67
Mendelssohn – Piano Trio No.2 in C minor, Op.66
Pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel are well-established in the world of chamber music. The married couple are artistic directors of the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society in New York and the Music@Menlo summer chamber music program and school in Atherton, California. They also tour as soloists, as a duo and in trios and quartets.
They came up with a promising idea for their program on Sunday – piano trios with Arnaud Sussmann on violin. Sussmann, who also plays viola, has toured with Wu Han and Finckel before (although the role is usually played by Philip Setzer, violinist for the Emerson Quartet, where Finckel was cellist for 34 years until 2013).
The centerpiece was Shostakovich’s immortal Trio No.2 in E minor, a pillar of twentieth-century chamber music, which incorporates a good deal of Jewish (or Jewish-sounding) tunes and gestures. Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in C minor employs Protestant hymns in its finale, while Haydn’s Trio in E major may lack specifically religious allusions, but elements of it point to aspects of the other two works so it made a good opener.
I have heard a lot of Wu Han and Finckel in my summers writing about the Aspen Music Festival, where both were on the faculty and performed often. If this wasn’t their most sterling performance, the clarity and elegance of their playing, as well as fidelity to the composers’ scores, paid dividends.
The Mendelssohn was the star, buoyant and refreshingly vital from start to finish. The songful melodic writing got a lovely lilt from the players, especially in the lullaby-like Andante espressivo. Throughout, the playing walked the line between precision and effusiveness.
The lively opening Allegro energico e con fuoco sneaked in with deft pianissimo playing and erupted into a barely contained romp. The ‘song without words’ aspects of the slow movement felt relaxed without dallying, and the Scherzo: molto allegro quasi presto was rapid without bluster, which accented its charm.
Best was the finale. Marked Allegro appassionato, the movement leapt out of the gate with enthusiasm, barely held back enough to make the music clear. In opening remarks, Wu Han had suggested that the music leading up to quotations of the Lutheran hymns ‘Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ’ and ‘Old Hundredth’ had a Jewish-sounding edge to it. The playing did not emphasize that distinction, but the execution of the hymns was appropriately expansive.
This second half of the program was chamber music at a high level, neither lowbrow nor highbrow but passionate and unified. The program’s first half had plenty of charm even if it often seemed to shy away from really diving into what the works were about. This was most evident in the Shostakovich, a 1944 work dedicated to the composer’s close Jewish friend Ivan Sollertinsky, a prominent Russian music critic who died as Shostakovich began writing the trio. A wrenching evocation of the dread the composer felt as he navigated his career under the dark threat of Stalin’s heavy criticisms, the music creates some of his spookiest effects. In her introduction, Wu Han likened the cello’s opening theme, all in high harmonics, to a scream into a pillow so as not to be heard. Finckel played it in an otherworldly hush, a nice idea even if it was barely audible when the piano and violin entered.
Those kinds of technical details, especially fast tempos, took some of the edge off the rest of the performance. The Andante – Moderato came at a pace that was not really moderato, muddling the growing complexity of the fugue-like development. The second movement, Allegro con brio, had so much brio that details, such as the quick crescendos on successive notes meant to evoke the surprises of Soviet oppression, hardly registered.
The stony, bracing Largo, a dirge with thundering chords underlining a slow lament tinged with Eastern European Jewish color, also moved too quickly for it to make its presence fully effective. The Allegretto finale, rife with the tunes and bouncy rhythms of klezmer, is said to be Shostakovich’s response to news of the Russian army’s liberation of Nazi concentration camps and the magnitude of the Holocaust. It came together best among the four movements, but it didn’t generate as much energy as it can.
The program began with Haydn’s Piano Trio in E major. The connection with other works on the list might have been the slow movement – a passacaglia that foreshadowed the striking Largo in the Shostakovich. It was the most effective movement in a carefully phrased and nicely balanced performance.
The concert’s encore harked back to Haydn with a brisk and breezy finale from the Piano Trio in A major, Hob.XV:18.
Harvey Steiman