Wanderer Trio
Schumann: Trio op. 63. Liszt: Tristia. Schubert. Trio op. 100. Wanderer Trio. Bourgie Room, Wednesday April 24, 2024.
The Wanderer Trio, an elite French ensemble, active for over 35 years, was at the Bourgie Hall on Wednesday evening for a Schumann, Liszt and Schubert program. This sumptuous meeting allowed us to have sensations different from those provided by the records.
The trio formed by Jean-Marc Phillips-Varjabédian on violin, Raphaël Pidoux, on cello, and Vincent Coq on piano is one of the beacons of musical life, since each record release is practically a reference. What we admire about the Wanderer is the beauty of the overall sound, the accuracy, the expressive flexibility and this musical responsiveness, a sort of permanent awakening to beauty.
On the disk we see nothing, we can only guess. So the imagination runs wild. It is obvious that Vincent Coq is a driving force: he launches the movement, frames the progress and seems to anticipate or announce the inflections, with a sort of 6e sense about how his two partners will react.
A great cellist
To see things, to be confronted with them at the concert, is to be faced with the “Eureka” effect and to understand other elements or springs which make the Trio Wanderer quite unique in the landscape or, at the very least, possess a “paw”, such a strong potential for seduction. Everything that has been said about Vincent Coq is true. We would have even personally fantasized about an even wider palette of shades in the pianos And pianissimos. But the great discovery of the concert is the sound of Raphaël Pidoux’s cello and its eminent part of the group’s personality. To feel the music of the Wanderer Trio in real life is to understand to what extent this cello attracts us as if into a musical and sound cocoon.
It is certain that the great work of the evening was theOpus 100 by Schubert, but it is Tristia by Liszt, late rearrangement, for trio, of the Oberman Valley, which, once assimilated the “Eureka” effect, was the most striking, because the one where Raphaël Pidoux worked the most miracles in terms of sounds, nuances, transitions. In the light of this roundness, this warmth and these quivers, a group interpretation of embracing beauty is constructed.
In the Trio op. 100 by Schubert, the Wanderer Trio does not overplay tragedy. The 2e movement is peregrinatory, pithy, but not dry or disembodied. All this is very difficult to describe, but we always have the impression of having before us a trio (a corpus of three voices and not three individuals), even when the instruments happen to be prominent here or there in a brief solo.
This sound corpus organically nourishes the music as in the 3e part: the scales are so obviously right that the movement breathes. The Wanderers do not “play” the Trio op. 100 where the Trio Op. 63 by Schumann; he breathes them. The highlight of Trio by Schumann, as in the recording was the exceptional musical and instrumental performance of the 2e movement, one of those typical “ Lebhaft doch nich zu schnell » (lively but not too fast) by Schumann.
After’Opus 100The Wanderers wanted to be nice while playing Of a spring morning by Lili Boulanger. It’s very lovable, and poor Lili, who died too young, is also to be pitied, but there are masterpieces likeOpus 100 by Schubert, or theOpus 111 of Beethoven in a piano recital, after which it is better to send everyone home to meditate than to screw it up by trying to be nice.