Paddington Trio play Brighton – review

Judith Weir (b 1954), Your Light May Go Out (2004, 2nd movement of Piano Trio Two); Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-2027), Piano Trio in D Op70 No 1 ‘Ghost’ (1808); Arvo Pärt (b 1935), Mozart – Adagio (1992, revised 2005); and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), Piano Trio No 2 in E minor Op67 (1944)

Exciting but strange and fascinating things happened on Sunday. Not just within the music’s performance and presentation but in the listeners, too. Several forces were at work. And the Coffee Concerts audience suddenly gave a glimpse of what it could become if it could capitalise consistently on its venue location on the western edge of the Sussex University campus, in temporary exile from The Corn Exchange for renovation.

This audience is already rewarding to perform to, with its collective knowledge and love of the music they know, and their sponge-like interest in exploring and absorbing that which they don’t. But on Sunday, not only in customary play were the extra musical awareness and learnedness generated by the high-quality accompanying programme brochure notes, plus the contingent of practising or studying musicians listening. There were vital human elements.

Setting the scene, then: a sunny morning, still plenty of autumn leaf colour, the audience up from 140 in October (Covid then threatening comeback) to 206 now (Covid receding, lots of the audience booster- and flu-jabbed), 50 people deciding on the day to pay at the door – that total of 206 was around the pre-pandemic average for a piano trio Coffee Concert. Optimism in the air. A new academic intake year at Sussex University and noticeably more students coming to listen than are usually retained later on in the concert season. Freshman inquisitiveness?

A new young trio, just two years together, still studying and training, average age 25; an Irishman, a Scandinavian, an American. A programme shot through with death references or signals, the latter two works in memory of a close friend lost. Twice, first-time-at-the Coffee Concerts contemporary music preceded a mainstream 19th or 20th century item. In deference to these celebrated programme notes . . . “They’re best we’ve ever seen [at a chamber music concert], so we didn’t think we needed to say much more to the audience,” the Dubliner advised me. So all they said to the audience was the names of the two pieces of each half and the hope they would be enjoyed, before they started playing – so that the second item began without a single word. It was the violinist from Helsinki who, after saying hello, spoke at the outset. After the interval the pianist from Los Angeles did their introduction.

A thought. Is there a more humanly arresting classical composer than the deaf freedom-fighter Beethoven? Possibly there still isn’t. Yet in this particularly violent year, someone may be edging closer. Shostakovich. It was probably more than 15 seconds after the final bar of the morning’s music, before anyone dared break the dead silence. Hanging airborne was Shostakovich’s last utterance of his enthrallingly tormented second Piano Trio. Once released, the applause just grew. A first curtain call. A second. Cheering. Whoops. The students were after their gig encore. But normally more contained older regulars were getting swept up and rediscovering their youth. Children proudly joined in.

What would be the Paddington Trio encore? There came another of those potent human elements. The Trio sat down and fumbled around on their music stands. Then from behind the string players the pianist rose, to begin announcing, “ . . . the third movement from a Haydn Trio.” Then broke off. The fiddler, playing from a digital tablet, looked in a small panic. “Ah,” said the pianist, “we haven’t the music” . . .

More on-stage consternation, then smiles. “Right, instead we’ll play the first movement from Haydn’s Piano Trio in C major – one of his London trios!” Relieved, joyful applause. Not a scampering Haydn finale, after all. A typically cheery yet seriously-shaped opening movement given spring, swing and bounce especially by cellist Patrick Moriarty. It would have gone down well in a Dublin tavern. The Paddingtons scored a follow-up triumph to their Shostakovich.

Yet they’d been a mysterious goal down. At the interval, their debut before one of Britain’s leading provincial chamber music audiences had a question mark over it. Having performed a Beethoven crowd-pleaser, they were sitting back in their dressing room having not been called back to the curtain at all – despite The Ghost’s exhilarations. It’s rare that a Coffee Concert’s first half ends this abruptly, no matter what the music’s mood. Bartok might confound or unsettle an audience with this effect but surely not Beethoven.

VAR was undecided. Was the music simply too familiar? Had the punters become indifferent? Had the students slumped back into Sunday-morning snooze mode? Or were they actually still acclimatising to their unusual musical adventure? After the Paddingtons’ enterprise in introducing Judith Weir to the Coffee Concerts – and rivetingly so – what had they done to deserve this?

This pundit senses it might be an arguably unaccustomed lightness of being they brought to Beethoven’s piece, where other ensembles will juxtapose extremes of fiery accent with sublime lyricism in the two outer movements, and higher ‘supernatural’ drama in the titular, groping central one. There was much understated yet subtly implied in this Paddington rendition. Even their fast movements had plenty of very soft sound, first foretelling then reflecting back on the middle movement, to which even their playing of Weir seemed to have pointed.

Stephanie Tang‘s Beethoven keys were fluent and dextrous but not, as so often presented, as though she’d just had another classic Beethovenian argument with her half-heard housekeeper. In the ‘Ghost’ movement she created washes of mystery which left lying pools of enigmatic colour.

Their Shostakovich was prickly, intense, yet still spotting when their violinist’s sweet pianissimo could underline humane contrast. Shostakovich here has his string duo sometimes stalking a world of their own, adding their own technical expressive effects. He disturbs us throughout. He deliberately takes an axe to his inner two movement just as they seem to be getting somewhere. His final death dance, more than Stravinsky’s which inevitably collapses into the soil (The Rite of Spring, of course), cannot stave off its own epilogue of shattered reflection. It’s this which so transfixes the audience at the end.

In unveiling Judith Weir, Paddington Trio came as a new intellectual programming force and presence on the scene. Entirely new faces, absorption in their mission. In Your Light May Go Out, Weir’s keyboard and string voices are as death is to two maidens, though they sometimes swap the role, with the Trio sharply alert to the conflictions, most of them dissonantly distant from Schubert’s elevated refinement, with even hints of ruthlessness and simpering suggested in this performance.

The coffee break done, the Paddingtons presented more new listening experience: Arvo Pärt’s retelling of a Mozart Adagio, his own remarks and angles interlaced, each instrument commenting in turn, and again with Tuulia Hero’s violin sotto voce marking out her unusual presence.

Paddington Trio appear to have an extra quality that will define itself to us in their coming third and fourth ensemble years. Moriarty, all in black with a high stand-collar shirt, knows how to draw in his watchers’ interest. Tang, her black top with an off-beat, one shoulder cut-out and fitted glossy dark blue midi-length skirt, has a natural animation in her pianistic involvement.

And Hero is an intriguing arrival on the chamber scene. Tundra-chill blonde, she, like her Finnish compatriot Sini Simonen of the Castalian Quartet, who has already endeared herself in these concert series, presents as a special team member, not an out-front individual. Tuulia is the Finnish ‘Julia’ but also means ‘winds’. Say her name “thooo-lia”, with a drawn-out first syllable, edged by the first ‘t’. The ‘uu’ equals our ‘oo’. Just as in her compatriot, the convention-questioning, genre-blending violinist Pekka Kuusisto (“Kooo-sisto”). Get this right and the real Santa Claus may start understanding you in Lapland.

Young debuts at the Coffee Concerts are now frequent. Paddington Trio may have potentially a feel of homeliness alongside their exploratory repertoire. Today, they broke their practice of talking to their listeners and creating the connection today’s audiences need. Next time, when they speak more, expect to start loving them.

And, assuming Tuulia Hero’s long, unbuttoned, stage shirt remains in one piece, already her trademark, be ready to spot what is printed down the back of it and normally obscured. Draping over her wide-cut trousers and patent black street shoes, what’s there explains the shirt’s all-over outburst of apricot, rust, sky, yellow, grey, beige and black. Running down the back is a full-length print of Gustav Klimt’s painting ‘The Kiss’.

Richard Amey

https://www.paddingtontrio.com/

(It’s ‘Paddington’ in memory of the station where they needed to meet, to reach their first nationwide booking – in Cornwall)

Supporting group Strings Attached’s chair Mary McKean is leaving Brighton and handing over to successor Helen Simpson, after co-spurring the Coffee Concerts’ survival since they had to end at The Old Market, Hove, in 2010. Their committee of audience members hunkered down with a series in St Nicholas’ Church, Brighton, until teaming up with The Dome, who staged their first Coffee Concerts with audience surrounding ensemble, all together on The Dome stage. Audience growth meant a shift next door into the Corn Exchange currently being rebuilt.

In introducing Sunday’s concert, Mary broke the news to the audience: “It’s been great fun. We were all addicted to chamber music and wanted it to continue.” She thanked for his help the Dome and Brighton Festival chief executive Andrew Comben, who joined with the venture and association, and who more normally welcomes the audience to each Coffee Concert.

Helen thanked the departing Mary for “such guidance and strong leadership,” adding about the concerts themselves, now: “Variety is very important, today.”

More here: www.stringsattachedmusic.org.uk

Next Coffee Concert (same venue & time):Sunday 11 December – Quatour Arod. The second French foursome this season. String quartets by Debussy (his one only, in Gm Op10), Benjamin Attahir (Al’ Asr, 2017) and Felix Mendelssohn (in D Op41 No1). Brief Q&A with QA on above link.

Tickets here or on the door www.brightondome.org O1273 709709