Kavakos, Ma, and Ax find power and subtlety in all-Beethoven Tanglewood recital
Photo: Hilary Scott Looking to establish himself as an original voice, Beethoven poured his first significant effort into piano trios, a genre he felt his predecessors Mozart and Haydn had not taken seriously. Of his Op. 1 set, the Piano Trio No. 3, cast in C minor, shows evidence of the Beethoven to come. Sudden shifts in dynamics and key create brooding tension, as if the composer was testing the very limits of high 18th-century style. (Haydn had criticized the score as unsuitable for contemporary Viennese audiences.) Yet violinist Leonidas Kavakos, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Emanuel Ax explored all the work’s classical-era elegance when they rendered the trio at Tanglewood's Koussevitzky Shed Friday night. By turns graceful and dramatically understated, the performance revealed early Beethoven less as a transitional figure and more of a composer firmly rooted in the style he had absorbed in his youth. From the opening bars of the Allegro con brio, ...