5 star review for ‘The Return’ in Pizzicato Magazine
Review by Remy Franck.
The Trio 258 formed in Amsterdam in 2015. It focuses especially on the Romantic period and now presents its first CD with a Rachmaninov program.
The two piano trios by Rachmaninov are entitled ‘élégiaque’. The second of these, the one with the opus number 9, was composed in 1893 when Rachmaninov learned of Tchaikovsky’s tragic death.
The Trio 258 deals sensibly with the music’s emotionality, which in some interpretations is heightened to the point of pathos, so that it becomes unbearable. In this performance, on the contrary, the three musicians dose tastefully in an always intense, exciting interpretation, using the exuberance of melodies and themes to stir up contrasts and give the work the great Russian soul that distinguishes it. The agitated long first movement is followed by a particularly beautifully and vividly played slow movement and the incisive finale.
The whole trio, then, is infused with a passionate breath, and so gets caught throughout in the tension between rhetoric and romantic sensuality of sound. Rachmaninov’s entire emotional palette is used with great urgency and much spontaneity, but without slipping into the irrelevantly sentimental.
Technically, the playing of Trio 258 is of captivating transparency. The sound engineering has achieved an excellent balance, giving great sonorous clarity to the brilliant playing of Lestari Scholtes, without this being at the expense of the two strings. Crespo’s playing is very intense, and the sound of his violin finds a secure foundation in Besseling’s sonorous cello.
With an arrangement of the 10th Prelude, the program finds a conciliatory conclusion after so much passion.
https://www.pizzicato.lu/leidenschaftlicher-rachmaninov-aus-den-niederlanden/
