Brahms:Trio no.1, op 8 (Bell Isserlis Hamelin) Verbier Festival 2014

Verbier Festival 2014: This year, the festival’s final weekend opened with a chamber concert celebrating one of those musical partnerships that brings years of history with it. British cellist Steven Isserlis and American violinist Joshua Bell came together with pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin to create a starry classical supergroup. Brahms’ Trio No. 1 in B major is one of the great works of the chamber repertoire – a miniature that packs symphonic scope and weight into its slight frame, setting cello and violin in an impassioned dialogue. Isserlis’s instinctual style shares little with Bell’s polished sweetness of delivery except an expressiveness that both arrive at by very different means. Here, Isserlis responded to the music’s every mercurial twitch and glance with vivid shifts, leading us in movement and muscular tone from the fugal Bach-inspired moments of the Allegro to its expansive moments of lyricism. Bell’s approach to performance is more crafted, but was no less striking here – goade