Recording of the Week, Dvořák from Veronika Jarůšková, Peter Jarůšek and Boris Giltburg

Today sees the release of the first recording from a recently-formed (and as yet nameless) piano trio which looks set to become a major force to be reckoned with, as Veronika Jarůšková, Peter Jarůšek and Boris Giltburg come together for Dvořák’s four surviving works in the genre and emerge quite literally with flying colours.

If those first two names don’t ring any immediate bells, that’s most likely because the Czech violinist and cellist are better known as half of one of the finest string quartets working today: the couple are members of the Pavel Haas Quartet, which has garnered a plethora of awards since its foundation in 2002, including one for their superb recording of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2 with Giltburg which featured in these pages back in 2017.

It was the Piano Quintet which brought the three artists together in the first place, at a chamber music festival in the Netherlands, and on a video-call from Supraphon HQ in Prague earlier this week Jarůšková beamingly informed me that it was a case of ‘love from the first note’. Listening to this recording, you can hear exactly why: these are musicians who seem to instinctively get each other, trading musical ideas with the easy spontaneity of three friends who are so in sync that they finish one another’s sentences.

Although their friendship was firmly established by the time they embarked on this project, the music itself was a blank slate for all three: there’s a lovely sense that these are interpretations which the group have built together from scratch, and their delight in that voyage of discovery is palpable from the very first minute of the recording.

The Piano Trio No. 1 (composed in 1875) opens with an airy bloom which rather puts me in mind of Schubert’s depictions of spring, and that sense of freshness infuses the whole of the long first movement: in lesser hands, you might occasionally be aware that this is a composer who’s still feeling his way in terms of developing his musical ideas, but the three are so meticulous about observing dynamic markings and so imaginative in the way they shade and inflect repeated phrases that there’s never a sense of inspiration beginning to pall. I mentioned ‘flying colours’ earlier, and one of the things which makes these interpretations so special is the group’s ability to change collective hue in a heartbeat – something which also pays particular dividends in the Beethovenian scherzo of No. 2 and in the great ‘Dumky’ trio, with its frequent sudden shifts from the elegiac to the exuberant.

And as on that earlier recording of the Piano Quintet, there are moments when the collective sound is so massive that it hardly seems credible that so few musicians are involved – notably in the final athletic stretches of this first trio (just before the music ebbs away like a mechanical toy running out of battery), in the near-symphonic first movement of the Piano Trio No. 3, and as the three hurtle towards the finishing-line in the first of the six ‘Dumky’ which opens No. 4. (Giltburg switches from his ’beloved’ rather soft-focus Fazioli to a bigger-boned instrument for these two later works, and both string-players match its brawn head-on).

The more introspective stretches are also beautifully done, not least the slow movements of the second and third trios (both composed in the aftermath of bereavement): the muted colours of that Fazioli really come into their own in the lovely elegy for Dvořák’s daughter in No. 2, and Jarůšek and Jarůšková respond in kind with a fragile lyricism that’s enormously touching.

A triumphant debut for this new super-trio, then, and one which whets the appetite for whatever they might choose to record next. Russian repertoire, perhaps: they made their debut together with Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in Brussels, and Giltburg has already persuaded them to join them in his beloved Rachmaninoff in concert. During our call on Monday he joked that the shelves at Supraphon Towers were groaning under the weight of awards for recordings by ‘Czech pop groups and the PHQ’ – on the evidence of this new project I think the label would be well advised to make room for several more...