When a star violinist like Maxim Vengerov decides to play chamber music, he can approach it two ways.
If he combines forces with instrumentalists of equal stature - Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim, for instance, with whom he played piano trios last year - then the creative friction between them is fascinating in itself, and audiences go to watch the sparks fly.
If he chooses to play with less exalted partners, as Vengerov did at the Barbican last night, when he was joined by the cellist Vagram Saradjian and the pianist Vag Papian, then the end product ought to be something else - performances in which there is a unity of purpose, and a shared perspective on interpretation.
Somehow, though, things did not cohere as they should. That was not at all because Vengerov was hogging the spotlight - he is a wonderfully selfless chamber musician. But nothing joined up here; shared phrases seemed to stop and start as they were passed from voice to voice, musical paragraphs seemed detached from each other.
It was as if the three players were locked in their own separate musical worlds, each perfectly conceived in its own right (some of the playing, not just from Vengerov, was very fine), but without any shared experience, or points of contact with the others.
Their programme was a wonderfully simple one, pairing the two greatest Russian piano trios: Shostakovich's second, in E minor, and Tchaikovsky's A minor trio. Both were conceived as elegies for friends, the Shostakovich, composed in 1944 after the Eighth Symphony, for the musicologist and critic Ivan Sollertinsky, the Tchaikovsky, from 1881, for the pianist Nikolay Rubinstein. Both can deliver a massive emotional charge. Shostakovich's lament is deeply personal, Tchaikovsky's more grandly and grandiosely public, but here neither plumbed the depths as it could have done.
The way Vengerov shaped the main theme of Shostakovich's slow movement was compelling, just as his pizzicato beginning to the gruesome danse macabre of the finale had exactly the right detachment.
And there were similar snatches of poetry in the second work too - the return of the main theme in Tchaikovsky's first movement, the crisp characterisation of some of the variations in the second.
But there were too many earthbound passages as well when the music just did not take wing. The second movement of the Tchaikovsky is quite often brutally cut in performance, but Vengerov and his colleagues did every note of it; there were moments when I guiltily wished they had not.
• This review appeared in some editions yesterday.
