The pianist Lars Vogt died in September last year. His cancer had been diagnosed in 2021, and he was already ill when, against doctors’ advice, he had travelled to Bremen to begin these Schubert recordings with his longtime collaborators, the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and his cellist sister Tanja. They began with the death-haunted E flat Trio, D929, with its funeral-march second movement, and recorded the B flat Trio, D898 four months later. In the sleeve notes to the set, the Tetzlaffs discuss the background to the sessions, paying touching tribute to their friend and his music making: “I find that in the recording,” says Tanja, “one notices that deep inside he already knew that in all likelihood he wasn’t going to be able to live very much longer.”
And fine as the playing of the Tetzlaffs is, appropriately it is Vogt’s wonderfully unshowy, rhythmically crisp and never overbearing playing that seems to characterise these outstanding performances, from his whisper-quiet pianissimos to the most forceful triple fortes. The strings match his wonderful dynamic range, too; the music flows naturally, without a moment of contrivance or artificiality, or any hint of sentimentality.
There’s also room on the discs for other late Schubert pieces, including the sublimely simple Notturno for Piano Trio, D897; the violin-and-piano Rondo, D895, and the Arpeggione Sonata, which is eased into life by Tanja and Vogt, and is never showy but full of shared gentle asides. But it’s the performances of the two trios that define this set. There are, of course, already many fine performances of these works on disc, from every generation of performers, but among recent versions there are none better than these.
This week’s other pick
As well as being one of the 20th-century’s finest violinists, a conductor, and the leader of perhaps the greatest of all string quartets, Adolf Busch was a composer of more than 100 works. They are rarely heard now, but the Sarastro Quartet’s disc of his chamber music, for CPO, gives a good sense of his fundamentally late-romantic style. Busch had been a protege of Max Reger, and in the works here – a string quartet in A minor, a set of nine pieces for string quartet, and a flute quintet – there are hints of Reger’s gnarly chromaticism in a musical world that seems rooted in Beethoven and remains very firmly tonal.
