Chamber music, as its very name suggests, was originally intended to be played in intimate circumstances - with friends, lovers or one's family. The great Portuguese pianist Maria Joao Pires has, it would seem, consciously striven to enact its inherent privacy in public. Her violinist, Augustin Dumay, is her partner; the cellist, Jian Wang, her son-in-law. The light of a standard lamp transforms the Wigmore platform into a drawing room, as the audience effectively eavesdrops on a family get-together.
Schumann and Schubert (both Pires specialities) formed the programme, which started with the latter's E Flat Piano Trio. This is one of the greatest chamber works, passing slowly from melancholy calm to extremes of despair, before hauling itself from the emotional depths to end on a note of uncertain, jittery optimism. The performance finds the Trio infinitely responsive to its gradations of mood, though not quite consistent in style. The Andante's accumulation of density, which turns beauty into horror, had chilling inexorability.
Pires played with her matchless limpidity, alternately teasing and coaxing a flawlessly coloured lyricism from Wang. Dumay adopted a broader approach. His tone is dark, sometimes shot through with acidic sharpness and he occasionally lets rip with a sweeping heft more appropriate to Brahms. He's happier with Schumann, when the Trio were joined for the E Flat Piano Quintet by Gordan Nikolitch (leader of the LSO) and French viola player Gérard Chausée.
The Quintet's manic-depressive combination of austerity and jolting emotion are better suited to Dumay's style. It's a fiddly work to get right, largely because Schumann doesn't give equal weight to the five performers. It is piano-driven, forcing Pires to set pace and tone, which she does to perfection. The string writing largely focuses on a sequence of dialogues for first violin and cello, allowing Dumay and Wang to duet and duel. Chausée has little to do until the tragic slow movement, where he comes into his own with force. Of the excellent Nikolitch we hear little (Schumann's fault, not his).
Throughout, the work's sudden swirls into manic excitement induced elation in the audience. There can't be many family get-togethers that bring the house down, as this one did.
