Egmont Trio: Ries

The Strad Issue: April 2025

Description: A figure too long in Beethoven’s shadow is allowed to shine

Musicians: Egmont Trio

Works: Ries: Piano Trios: in C minor, F minor

Catalogue number: Naxos 8.551486

Poor Ferdinand Ries. Common wisdom tells us that his music sounds rather like his friend and master Beethoven’s, although less distinctive, less intense. Look at it from Ries’s point of view, though: it would have been impossible for anyone so closely associated with Beethoven to escape his overwhelming influence.

Nevertheless, the gradual rediscovery of Ries’s music has revealed a composer of no little ability, even if some of the fun lies in spotting near-quotes from his friend’s music. Ries, though, was a keyboard virtuoso of a rather different stripe, closer in style to Hummel, which sets his chamber music with piano apart. And while his choice of C minor is an audacious case of parking his guns on Beethoven’s lawn, that virtuosity – not least in the piece’s cat-and-mouse finale – and the lyricism of second subjects and slow movements, where the strings come to the fore, show that he was ever his own man.

The Nash Ensemble has recorded the C minor Trio (Hyperion) but the Egmont Trio offers a period-instrument alternative, the savoury-toned strings close-miked in preference to the slightly more distant piano. The still more impassioned F minor work is a first recording, in four movements rather than the C minor’s three – a perky polacca placed third – and here again we appreciate that Ries is more than merely Beethoven-lite, a realisation enhanced by the conspicuous sensitivity and authority of the Egmont’s performances.

DAVID THREASHER