Lajtha premier in London

The latest success of the Takács Piano Trio

The Takács Piano Trio was founded only three years ago but it has already gained an international reputation. Last week on the 27th March they gave a concert for the second time in one of the most prominent concert halls of the world, in the Wigmore Hall in London.

The acoustically outstanding old concert hall was built by the Bechstein piano manufacturing firm at the turn of the century. Many great musicians played here like Rubinstein, Sarasate, Hindemith, Britten, Prokofiev --just to sample some of the names from the list of venerable artists. According to those who are familiar with the musical life in London, the audience of the Wigmore Hall is well above the general standard: they are fastidious and open to novelties. This refined audience listened to the three outstanding Hungarian musicians with close attention, engrossed with their performance and gave a long and warm ovation to Gábor Takács-Nagy violinist, Dénes Várjon pianist and Péter Szabó cellist, who selected pieces from Beethoven (trio in C minor, Op.1, No.3), László Lajtha, Liszt and Schumann (trio in D minor, Op.63) for their program.
The English audience thirsty for novelties welcomed Lajtha's 1928 Op.10 Trio concertante with great anticipation as this piece had never been performed in the UK before. Lajtha's close connections to musical life in London only enhanced interest -- he lived here for a year from 1947 to 1948 and he composed some magnificent music for Höllering's film adaptation of T.S.Eliot's drama Murder in the Cathedral. Hungary imposed silence on the composer, but many of his pieces were performed in London with great success.

The Trio concertante's chief attraction besides its technical demands is that it is a piece of chamber music and a concerto at the same time: it requires perfect, complex and complementary playing , while it also consists of virtuoso solo cadenzas typical of the concerto genre. The very talented musicians meet this double demand completely. They performed the first and last movement (titled as First and Second Concert) with a moving enthusiasm and passion; the touching, intimate lyricism and ethereal subtleties of the Intermezzo also came across perfectly. The Saint-Sans transcript of Liszt's symphonic poem, the Orpheus was interpreted expressively, with rich colours and form. The members of the trio take meticulous care in balancing their collective sound - while their goal is to explore the inner logic and architecture of a given musical unit, they do not leave space for any problems.
The concert was an album premier at the same time. The audience at Wigmore Hall was the first to see the latest Hungaroton album, whose entire contents --three Liszt transcripts (among them the Orpheus) and two Lajtha compositions (among them the Trio concertante) --was a world premier; it is the first time that a recording has been made of them. The Takács Trio travelled to Switzerland on the following day, where they performed Lajtha's trio again. Next time they are going to give a concert in the Wigmore Hall on the 26th April when their Haydn and Beethoven concerto will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.
London, April 1999

Emőke Solymosi Tari

Translation by Susan Kapás

Magyar Nemzet
April 1999