Shining Seattle debut of The Icicle Creek Piano Trio

Any of us who hike know where Icicle Creek is. So do musical devotees who make the trek over the mountains to the Icicle Creek Music Center for concerts or a festival near Leavenworth. But we haven’t had its resident chamber ensemble, The Icicle Creek Piano Trio, come the other way to perform here in Seattle until Saturday night when it gave a concert of music by Turina, Clara Schumann and Shostakovich Downstairs at Town Hall.

The group’s quality has been heralded by the recent release of its CD of Ravel and Schubert, which has received rave reviews from Gramophone, Strad and Fanfare magazines and the American Record Guide, rare for a debut recording. More about this down the page.

Concert-goers Saturday were not disappointed. America’s Jennifer Caine, violin, England’s Sally Singer, cello, and Russia’s Oksana Ezhokina, piano, play with that sensitivity to each other which comes usually with years of playing together. Singer never seemed even to look at the others, she seemed to have her eyes shut, yet she and the others over and over would come in at exactly the same moment with the same artful shaping and dynamic of a particular phrase. It was as though they breathed together. It’s intelligent playing, with each work receiving attention to its era as well as its composer and its overarching structure.

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The hors d’oeuvre of the concert, Turina’s “Circulo” for Piano Trio had a lightness and charm, with a dancing energy in the middle movement that made you want to get moving in time to it, and a lyricism which owed much to the Iberian romanticism of the piece.

Hearing Clara Schumann’s only piano trio, in G Minor, serves to show up how much we have lost over the centuries by the dismissal of women composers. Only a few managed to get past the shibboleths of their era. I hope that somewhere in dusty attics there are more works to be discovered by such women as Fanny Mendelssohn and Schumann or their predecessors of earlier centuries.

Schumann’s trio is a work which can stand beside those of her husband, or Brahms, or any other of the famous male composers of the day. It’s gorgeous music, thematically and harmonically beautiful and developed with fresh ideas, drama and feeling, all of which the Icicles brought out. Although we always associate Schumann solely with the piano, she writes rewardingly for strings, and this is no piano solo with string accompaniment.

Caine and Singer draw such similar tone qualities that their instruments sound like a matched pair. Each, and Ezhokina on the piano, plays so that her tone sounds as deep as a well. Within that depth they create all sorts of nuance to color the music, the string players including in that a use of vibrato which is truly an ornament, varied according to the mood which they want to achieve, while Ezhokina’s touch is always sensitive to the composer’s intent. All three play very softly in a way that sings, neither breathy in the strings or tentative, and they also don’t equate loudness and fierceness with banging on the keys or sawing on the strings.

This was particularly notable in Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No 2 in E Minor, from 1944, only eight years in time after the Turina but light years away in emotion.

I’ve always felt that to play Shostakovich and grasp what the composer is saying, the players have to have lived under oppression. Many years ago a player from a traveling Russian youth symphony told me that they because they could not speak their feelings in the country, they ended up being played out on their instruments. We are fortunate that in this area we have many musicians who grew up in Russia before glasnost, and thanks to their input, we do hear memorable Shostakovich performances.

This was one of them. While the earlier movements are sunnier and have less than the composer’s usual undercurrents, they are arrestingly original, beginning with the cello’s soft, high harmonics at the start. There’s a feeling later of hurried, trudging feet but not of fear or doom such as you find in others of Shostakovich’s work, while the third movement feels like an elegy and a memory. As the Icicles played the last movement, it unfolded full of resistance, anger and frustration being danced out, with sadness underlying all. There was a sense of a simmering pot, and, finally resignation. It was vivid, emotional and never lost shape as a musical work. This was fine artistry.

The CD, on Con Brio Recordings, is superb. All of the musicians’ above-mentioned attributes pertain. Their playing of Ravel’s only Piano Trio is as fine an interpretation as I ever hope to hear, while Schubert’s E-flat Trio is drop-dead beautiful. The second movement in particular is ravishing, played with a tenderness which brings a lump to the throat, though there is nothing sentimental about it.

So make your way to Icicle Creek this summer, hike first and take in a concert in the evening and listen to this terrific ensemble.