Review: Paddington Trio Brighton Festival 2023

World Premier, Burrell: ’Frieze’; Haydn, Piano Trio in C major Hob XV: 27; Brahms, Piano Trio No 2 in C major Op87.

Ask a painter to create a work in response to a piece of music. The result? It’s likely to be semi-spontaneous, the process uncomplicated, the result visible, tangible. The viewer sees. Reverse the idea, suggest a composer interprets a picture in music, and success in even producing anything at all can be elusive. For the listener to interpret and ingest what’s heard of the result is even more chancy.

Music’s sound, colour and inference varies from ear to ear. It’s a brave project to undertake at someone else’s behest. Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition and Respighi his Three Botticelli Pictures. Both were successes – but probably in part because it was their own idea and they could work in the home-territory freedom of their strongest personal musical medium.

Choosing piano, we know the Russian composer addressed different paintings of vivid and sharply defined people and objects. The Italian, in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, was struck by three Renaissance masterpieces of obvious mythical interpretation, and chose small orchestra. British composer Diana Burrell was asked by a Maltese Festival celebrating Beethoven to write a piece for piano trio, of specified short length, the suggesting departure point being Gustav Klimt’s three-wall mural, Beethoven Frieze. The Viennese artist’s conception surrounded in three sides the 1902 exhibition of a new statue of the German composer, sculpted by Max Klinger.

Burrell (as in “funnel”) completed this challenging commission in 2020 and called it simply ‘Frieze’, only for Covid suddenly to rule out Valetta’s entire Spring Orchestra Festival. Three years on, her originally intended ensemble, Ameraldi Trio, had bitten the dust. So when Burrell asked Brighton Festival about trying it, the Festival grabbed this world premiere, booking the young Paddington Trio, who had shone at The Dome’s Coffee Concerts debut in November.

Klimt gived Burrell dimensional help. His Beethoven Frieze depicted a concept, of a human destiny fulfilled through the enjoyment of art, with Beethoven’s success the prime example of art itself providing a redemptive way of life. Klimt cast the sequence of universal experience in four panels, loosely imitating the four-movement course of Beethoven’s own Choral Symphony.

Firstly, Klimt’s The Longing for Happiness has a gold-clad knight leading mankind forward in hope. Second, we see The Hostile Forces which ensnare the aspiring human soul – in representations of Sickness, Madness, Death, Debauchery, Unchastity and Excess. Then The Longing for Happiness fulfilled in Poetry shows a harpist, symbolising the world of art, freeing up humans to float and fly. Finally, a choir and an embracing couple under a golden arch depict A Kiss for the Whole World.

Burrell, whose research sources, she told me, all assumed three panel illustrations, and she perceived it compositionally that way, producing a continuous work, with no improvisation, in three stages, Longing For Happiness – Hostile Forces – Fulfilment.

“Three parts is such a satisfying format”, she says. “Sadly I haven't seen [Beethoven Frieze] in the real. The idea of setting out on a quest, yearning for something, passing through dark forces / difficulties and then coming out the other side with a sense of achievement appealed to me as that archetypal 'journey' which makes for a very satisfying architecture – think 'Midsummer Marriage' / 'Magic Flute ' / Nielsen's 5th Symphony to give just 3 examples.

“I was happy to consider the Klimt piece as a springboard and very much enjoyed researching it. But the whole piece can't be viewed as an exact musical transcription of the Klimt. It is a different medium and has its own progress, but the philosophical issues in the Klimt are hopefully hinted at, and I think the limited but beautiful colours in the artwork are mirrored by the limited use of only three musicians in my piece.

“I'd not come across Paddington Trio before – and I'm glad Brighton Festival asked them, as I thought they were excellent. They tell me they have plans to play the work again (I got the impression they genuinely enjoyed working on it) – whether they will record it I don't know, it's early days yet!”

The Paddington Trio is young, emerging: competition successes, notably at Tallinn, Graz, Royal Over-Seas League and the Clara Schumann; upcoming festival debuts after Brighton at Buxton, Schiermonnikoog (Netherlands), Lake District Summer and Edinburgh Fringe; their Beethoven Triple Concerto debut was in Finland in March. Having in April added The Parkhouse Award ahead of other international trios in the final at Wigmore Hall, alarm clocks forewarning their third lunchtime concert in six days, the Paddingtons arrived at Theatre Royal on Monday morning.

“I’m not very good early in the day, I like my late nights!” confessed Finnish violinist Tuulia Hero (“Tchoolee-er Herro”) . . . “We met Diana for the very first time this morning and ran through Frieze for her,” continued Los Angeles pianist Stephanie Tang . . . “And we were quite pleased because Diana had only a couple of things she felt she needed to point out,” completed Dubliner cellist Patrick Moriarty.

The Trio presented Burrell’s three stage sequence of (quoting her own programme note) brightening and intensifying serenity and simplicity, then unsettled and rough music, transformed into warmth and lyricism of fulfilment. The Burrell voice I heard is strongly inflected with 20th Century accents, creating mysterious, tense string tremolandos, unsettling or disorientating note clusters, and subtle, soft harping of the piano’s interior strings. All expressive in dealing with the fundamental human experiences of survival and searching that Klimt deals with.

Burrell’s ‘Longing for Happiness’, despite serenity and simplicity, disquietens, and strives up blind alleys and ascents with no rewarding views. Her ‘Hostile Forces’ is rightly dissonant, sometimes vehement, or gritty. Her ‘Fulfilment’ carries reservations as a destination attained but still with unresolved tensions – we’ve still got to live together, and maybe bliss is an illusion or even after all an impossibility? Or is this fulfilment goal not final enduring peace but, instead, death?

Tang’s piano sets up many different textures, semi-abstractions and new canvases, often fervently in patterns and figures (those Klimtian expanses of decoration?). Hero and Moriarty’s string harmonies, cells, melodic ideas and energies comment or describe, uncoloured by the piano often pausing, silent. Isolated pizzicato notes sting or jolt tempting reveries. The glissando piano strings evoke living touch, or far distant thunder. Ambiguity for us to sort out.

Overall, Burrell succeeded in portraying Klimt’s stark juxtaposed with the sensuous. However, with no guarantee that even half an audience would have read about the work before it began, or maybe even knew Klimt’s format and style, how could Frieze be more fully appreciated in performance? It’s not ‘absolute’ music. This early in its career, before wider familiarity, does Burrell’s Frieze need its listeners actually to see Beethoven Frieze? On a projection, maybe? To stimulate response, enlarge the experience.

Tuulia Hero, this time playing a Stradivarius violin, left at home her familiar stage shirt with its colouring and literal print of Klimt’s The Kiss, and introduced a new bold leaf/bloom printed alternative in black and white. An interesting stage presentation decision to have had to make! Was she perhaps cheering for the Hostile Forces?

And so, for the Paddington Trio’s hour in Brighton, this World Premiere was followed by their Haydn and Brahms, both containing Hungarian elements, both deliberately in optimistic C major – surely a sound Springtime approach. Indeed, the day played ball. It was sunny and warm.

Their Haydn was athletic, yet often relaxed, sometimes tender, with a cherishing grace about their instrumental dialogue, but always alive. Their finale jumped and sprang, hurried and scurried, with those endemic, essential Haydn smiles. So fresh and engaging came their opening Allegro that the audience applauded it.

Tang is a Guildhall Gold Medallist whose past American teachers include Peter Serkin, Robert Levin, Richard Goode, Jonathan Biss and the abrasively frank Beaux Arts Trio founder Menahem Pressler who died only 6 May in his 100th year. Tang’s a livewire engine room in this ensemble. Bright as a button, always facially and musically mobile, she liberates Hero and Moriarty, who are ostentatious in neither individuality or combination – which creates a ensemblic whole always appearing ready and poised for what’s next.

Tang’s Concerto debut was in Brahms’ First Concerto, a portent that the Paddington Trio can deliver in this composer’s chamber music that stands among the world’s widest and supremest. Here today was, I sense, the least-heard of his three Piano Trios but Brahms rated this No 2 among his own finest chamber pieces – from a composer setting himself the highest bar, who ruthlessly consigned much of his own work to the blazing fire grate. The Paddington again excited and rewarded their audience, who again applauded the opening Allegro.

Tang, Hero and Moriarty evince Brahms that is sinewy, urgent and emphatic, as well as flowing and enriching. They scored at their Dome November Coffee Concert at ACCA with Weir, Beethoven, Pärt and Shostakovich. That’s promising artistic breadth, and even if linking with Paddington takes more travel time than to Victoria, Brighton folk are shedding any age-old Southern Railway partisanship and going to these three musicians in their endearing ensemble.

Richard Amey

Diana Burrell picture by Pascal Fallas