Washington Classical Review

Pianist Wu Han, violinist Arnaud Sussman and cellist David Finckel performed Sunday at Wolf Trap. File photo: Cherylynn Tsushima

Wu Han’s final season as artistic adviser to the chamber music series at Wolf Trap continued with her penultimate performance Sunday afternoon. Cellist David Finckel and violinist Arnaud Sussmann joined her on the stage of The Barns for a program of piano trios. Although it may have appeared on paper like a run-of-the-mill program of classic repertoire, the pianist’s passionate explanations, partly supplanting the venue’s usual talks, belied that impression.

In lesser hands, Haydn’s Piano Trio No. 44 can seem lightweight. One of the composer’s last three piano trios, dedicated to pianist Therese Jansen Bartolozzi, a close friend whose marriage Haydn had witnessed a couple years earlier, the work radiated blissful confidence. Sussmann and Finckel ornamented the piano part delicately, but the first movement’s success came down to how Wu Han handled the deceptively simple main theme, as well as the delicate rendering of the ornate decoration in 32nd notes.

The second movement, an austere passacaglia in the parallel minor, revealed the composer’s study of J.S. Bach’s counterpoint. After a hushed unison presentation of the repeating bass line, in all three instruments, Wu Han handled the long piano solo section with quiet grace. The Finale, set at a controlled tempo, sounded playful and stormy in the later Minore sections. Sussmann took advantage of one passage with an extended violin solo to display his most honeyed tone.

All three instruments shared the spotlight equally in Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2, music that proved as somber and grief-stricken as the Haydn was sunny. Shostakovich dedicated the piece to a close friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, who had died in 1944. Sollertinsky was, in the words of Shostakovich scholar Laurel Fay, the composer’s “closest friend and companion,” the sounding board whose opinion Shostakovich valued most when he completed a new composition.

In the perilous opening of the first movement, Finckel’s high harmonics were a bit rough-edged. This ghostly sound then sang in dialogue with Sussmann’s rich playing on his lowest string, an inversion of the normal tonal order because it is lower in pitch than the cello. Wu Han added even lower rumbling octaves to round out this moving portrait of musical mourning. The Moderato section, featuring a new theme for the piano, drew the work closer to the spirit of Haydn.

All three musicians hammered the biting themes of the second movement, which Sollertinsky’s sister singled out as a vivid depiction of her brother’s personality and way of speaking. Wu Han drew a connection between this trio and the Haydn trio because of the third movement, which is also in the passacaglia form. The pianist’s stark attack on the repeating series of chords rang out like a threnody of grief, with Sussmann and Finckel embroidering this pattern with glowing melodic lines.

In the fourth movement, Shostakovich set a folk-style melody as a tribute to Sollertinsky’s Jewish heritage, a melody also used in the composer’s eighth string quartet. A grim-faced danse macabre, the movement had a percussive dryness to it, from all the string pizzicati and sharp-fingered piano staccato notes. A shimmering close in the major key, with evanescent strummed chords from the strings, gave a sense of hope dawning.

Wu Han’s programming thread continued, somewhat tenuously, in the final work, Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 2. The Mendelssohns were a prominent Jewish family in Berlin, but Felix had been baptized as a Christian at the age of seven. Elements of Jewish music or identity, if found in this piece at all as Wu Han posited, are largely overshadowed by the Protestant tunes quoted in the Finale.

As with much of Mendelssohn’s chamber music, the weight of this trio rests on the pianist’s shoulders, and Wu Han delivered a punch of energy to the roiling first movement. Her transparent runs left enough space for the string lines to come through clearly. Even lovelier was the lullaby of the second movement, with rocking melodic tenderness from all three musicians.

The Scherzo proved a mad dash from start to finish, again with quicksilver fleetness that focused on the arc of the lines rather than individual notes. Over the dancing first theme of the Finale, which opens with a leap of a minor 9th in the cello part, Wu Han gave imperial weight to the quotation of the chorale “Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ,” sung often at Christmas but also adjusted to other feasts with different texts.

The expected shift from C minor, which has dominated the piece, to C major at the end of the Finale, took on a religious tinge. The three musicians did not overplay this transition, making the appearance of the even more famous tune known as “Old Hundredth” (the Protestant Doxology) an organic moment of musical arrival. 

Acknowledging that they had given the audience a “full meal,” the musicians offered an airy encore as dessert, the comic Finale in A Major from Haydn’s Piano Trio No. 32, bringing the concert full circle to where it started.

Pianists Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung perform music for four hands by Busoni, Poulenc, Schumann, Ravel, and Debussy 3 p.m. March 2. Wu Han’s last appearance this season will be 3 p.m. March 16, in Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. wolftrap.org