Festival Music

Fortepiano Trios

St Cecilia's Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

ON A muggy day in the capital, the three players on the platform of the city's oldest recital space were having fewer tuning problems with their vintage instruments than the Academy of Ancient Music had at the Queen's Hall earlier. In fact the fortepiano being played by one of the instrument's foremost exponents, Kristian Bezuidenhout, is just eight years old, but a copy of a keyboard of 1805, so perhaps its modern construction is a benefit. That did mean, however, a design that post-dated everything in the programme, with early Beethoven following Mozart and Haydn, so the choice was surely debatable: Haydn's Piano Sonata in G minor in particular is arguably better suited to harpsichord, and the resonant bottom notes of the fortepiano, while sounding lovely, jarred a little with the rest of the piece.

Be that as it may, here was some glorious playing in this lovely acoustic, and Bezuidenhout in no way outshone his collaborators, violinist Shunske Sato and cellist Jonathan Cohen. The balance of the instruments in the space was ideal, and Sato had the best of the music in the Mozart, which comes from the time of the composer's fullest flowering in symphonies and opera, when memorably melodies poured out of him.

On the Beethoven we were immediately in a more modern world, duties shared more equally and Cohen's virtuosity its share of the spotlight, with radical phrasing in the pizzicato passages of the slow second movement. Although the dynamics of the piece occasionally over-powered the keyboard sound, on the finale – more robust than anything up to that point – it was the lightning-fingered playing of Bezuidenhout that stole the show.