Any concert involving Martha Argerich is a special event. The promise of hearing the pianist doing what one suspects she enjoys most these days – playing chamber music with old friends – meant that the queue for returns spilled out on to the pavement. Here, that old friend was the cellist Mischa Maisky, with whom Argerich has been collaborating for almost half a century, and they were joined by the violinist Yossif Ivanov.
Maisky had only returned to the concert platform three weeks ago after serious illness and looked rather frail. There were moments when his playing seemed to lack assertiveness, too. Not so much in the Bach cello suite with which he opened the concert, the G major BWV1007, which a few moments of roughness apart, had an easy fluency, but in the two piano trios that he played with his colleagues, in which the cello line sometimes seemed to get submerged. Yet his shaping of solos in the slow movements of both Haydn’s G major “Gypsy Rondo” piano trio and Mendelssohn’s D minor Trio was certainly eloquent, and matched beautifully to Ivanov’s equally elegant violin. They were touching too in the piano-trio arrangement of Schubert’s song Du Bist die Ruh, which was added as an encore.
