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Reviews

Clive O'Connell THE AGE
Collins St. Baptist Church, March 18 2008

www.musicaviva.com.au
Musica Viva's popular Coffee Concert series began this year with the Freshwater Trio revisiting some material programmed in the group's subscription recitals last year, adding in a Haydn work to flesh out the recital's  length.  

In the centre of the morning's work came local composer Adam Yee's Hallelu et Hashem min hashamayim, a highly individual response to Psalm 148 in  which David commands praise for God from all creation, animate and inanimate. This short piece appeared on the Trio's November recital last year when its dramatic movement from high activity to near-stasis and back again attracted most interest.  This time around, what impressed more was the demand for micro-intervals from the string players, giving the work's impact an unusual, unsettling character as though Yee were attempting to generate sound facets or near-images of the same note, a technique requiring a high degree of pitch exactitude from Zoe Black's violin and Josephine Vains' cello.

At the beginning of 2007, the Freshwaters produced an impressive version of the Ravel Piano Trio, more assured and vital than expected and setting a benchmark for the group's peers. Tuesday morning's reading  proved even more satisfying on nearly every level; even the usual weak spot for every trio, the opening Modere, had gained in melancholy sweetness and the following Pantoum came over with even more aggressive bite.  But this ensemble's communal strengths shone in the heady last movement where, supported by the rapid-beating trills from both strings,  Eidit Golder produced a chain of passionate declamations, full-blooded chords enunciated  with gripping and unapologetic energy.

The program's opening Haydn trio, the last one in E flat, proceeded in elegant fashion up to the final Allemande where the players made a strong case for the composer's often under-valued sense of humor with some effective introduced emphases and shifts in pace; nothing overdone or heavy-handed,  just enough undermining of expectations to keep the audience interested and, in this case, entertained by the result.

2007

Clive O'Connell THE AGE 29/11/07
Melba Hall, November 27
An innovative and well-balanced take on a noble stalwart

In a four-part program fancifully called The Wandering Jew, Melbourne's Freshwater Trio began its final 2007 recital with that familiar survivor from national and international music competitions, Mendelssohn's Piano Trio in D minor.

This noble, concisely argued work has been played here by every ensemble of note, so the Freshwater group had plenty of remembered competition, but the interpretation on Tuesday evening turned out to be innovative adn well-balanced; something you cannot say every time you hear it. Pianist Eidit Golder opened the work's brooding first movement by supporting Josephine Vains' cello and keeping a steady background presence when Zoe Black's violin entered, rather than dominating with passage work as done by so many keyboard participants. Of course, the explosions came from this insightful pianist at the right time, but the reading provided a continuously valid experience for the audience of how to play as a trio, Black's violin line singing to effect in the benign Andante.

To finish, the group dusted off an arrangement of Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht for piano trio by Eduard Steuermann, the brilliant polish-born musician who premiered most of the Second Viennese School's piano works. The transcription gives the original string sextet a more earth-bound environment, although Golder's part rarely seemed cluttered in negotiating four lines. What did impress was the arranger's fluency in allocating melodic material and Freshwaters' realisation of the work's heavy-hitting power up to the riveting final pages.

At the night's centre came a continuous double: Adam Yee's mobile arrangement of the Mahler song Das irdische Leben, which flowed into an original trio, Hallelu et Hashem min hashamayim - an arresting reaction to Psalm 148, Praise the Lord from the Heavens. While the Mahler arrangement maintained the insistent character of the song's dialogue between a starving child begging for bread and its helpless mother, the new trio showed the young composer's originality of voice, its five-minute spanmoving from the dramatic vigour to a static plateau and back again, using the three instruments sensibly and emphasising their interdependence in language that unifies the acerbic and the lyrical.

Clive O'Connell THE AGE 2/6/07 "Prosaic start, then floodgates burst"

"the group came together to perform the Shostakovich Piano Trio in E minor, notable for a breathtakingly rapid second movement and an acerbic, percussive view of the work's second half led by Golder, who joined both string players at full emotional and dynamic stretch, working these noble pages to extract every ounce of loss and tragedy."

Clive O'Connell THE AGE 14/3/07

Melba Hall, March 6
IN A series spaced throughout the year of thematic recital programs, the Freshwater Trio opened their account on Tuesday night with a nearly all-French program, highlighting music by that strangely ad hoc amalgamation of composers called Les Six.

This unlikely group contained three names that still resonate with music lovers: Honegger, Milhaud and Poulenc. One of the others, Georges Auric, has continuing fame for his film music. Germaine Tailleferre enjoys the distinction of being the only female in the set, while Louis Durey is almost entirely forgotten.

These bright young things of 1920s Paris certainly knew each other but they collaborated on one work only: a collection of piano pieces called Album des Six, played at this recital by the Freshwater pianist, Eidit Golder.

Golder dispatched each with flair, her technique rarely taxed, although the Poulenc Valse asked for extra through its brisk power. More taxing material came in the terse Piano Trio by Honegger, a single-movement piece revealing a powerful voice of determined statements, more indebted to German late romanticism than one would have expected. Tailleferre's Piano Trio, written in 1917 and revised 60 years later, shows the composer's much-praised vivacity and buoyant lyricism, well realised by Zoe Black's violin line, which relished this amiable work's pastel-shaded charm.

Keith Humble's arrangement of the Liszt symphonic poem Orpheus opened the program. Another of the Freshwater group's left-field offerings, it intrigued for the Australian composer/arranger's allocation of material, although much of this fell under Golder's care.

To finish, the musicians gave an engrossing reading of the Ravel Piano Trio, a work that offers its executants so much but which rarely succeeds as a whole.

This reading, however, brought out much of the score's magic, including some penetrating, reliable work from Black and cellist Josephine Vains in dangerous harmonics passages, and a moving realisation of the last movement's tremendous bursts of declamation for the piano, here striding across the nimbus-like string trills to bring the work to a rousing conclusion.

Despite the positive impact of this Ravel performance, I'd like to hear it from these players in a couple of years; of the local groups who have attempted it, the Freshwaters stand the best chance of mastering the manifold traps and stumbling blocks that pepper every page.

2006

Clive O'Connell THE AGE 14/7/06

Three of Melbourne 's better-known younger musicians have banded together as the Freshwater Trio, presenting their first recital on Tuesday night in an all-Brahms program. Violinist Zoe Black, cellist Josephine Vains and pinist Eidit Golder eventually came together in the night's second part for the magnificent sprawl of Brahms' B major Trio. Unlike many other version of this work, the piano part stayed under control, not bursting out into all-enveloping concerto mould and swamping the two string players. ..Golder kept matters taut and swift, not wallowing in washes of over-pedalling or insisting on dynamic pre-eminence. As a result we heard Vains' cello producing notes that usually vanish, and Black's middle register melodies had plenty of room to breathe.

The group varied their diet, beginning with the D minor Violin Sonata, which also impressed for its uncluttered spaciousness, notably in the fierce rollicking of the finale.

Clive O'Connell THE AGE 5/9/06 - “Rising to Beethoven challenge”

For the second recital in its first year of operation, the Freshwater Trio focused on Beethoven, not letting themselves off lightly with the over-familiar, although the program's final content was the popular Ghost Trio. Golder began with the late Bagatelles Op.126..She had a full technical command of these challenges, taking time to let the second piece breathe but maintaining its aggression.

Vains partnered Golder in the D major (cello Sonata) Op.102. This yielded intense and gripping pages, especially in the final challenging fugue...Such pages require level-headedness and fearlessness, qualitites apparent in this shapely reading.

..The Freshwaters gave a lucid and attractive account of the spacious Ghost Trio, Golder tamping down her dynamic, even in the first movement, but taking the reins back for the optimistic finale. Black sang out her melody lines with a well-crafted sweetness of timbre, making a big contribution to this well-deliberated, involving interpretation.

Xenia Hanusiak THE HERALD SUN 18/7/06

For their inaugural concert they chose a Brahms program, fragmenting the notion of the trio by performing the Sonata in d minor, the Intermezzi for solo piano (op.117)...coming into ensemble with the Piano Trio in B major…it was the trio and the confluence of three energies that sparked the most interest. Freshwater opted for a bold approach. Vains opened with pitch-secure confidence in the opening theme and fostered a steady energy throughout the four movements. The trio concentrated on creating a drama from the score, calling the shots plainly and squarely and allowing little room for nostalgia or sentimentality. With its effusive spirit, the Freshwater Trio appears determined to make a lasting impression.