Neave Trio: Rooted

The Strad Issue: August 2024

Description: A typically unorthodox programme from an exploratory trio

Musicians: Neave Trio

Works: Coleridge-Taylor: Five Negro Melodies. Martin: Trio. Smetana: Piano Trio. Suk: Piano Trio

Catalogue number: CHANDOS CHAN20272 

This is the Neave Trio’s sixth release for Chandos and it draws together a range of folk-music influences. The emotional temperature of Smetana’s Piano Trio in G minor is, like that of his String Quartet ‘From My Life’, coloured by personal events: in this case the death of his four-year-old daughter. Appropriately, the players mine the furrowed brow of the first movement, which opens with a rasping Gypsy-like spirit and features a contrasting heartfelt second theme on cello. Save for a tarantella-like feel to the (enthusiastically played) finale, though, the folk element would seem to lie more with the composer himself than the piece.

The spirituals-based Coleridge-Taylor melodies offer a welcome contrast to the surrounding Romanticism. Perhaps the slower tunes, ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child’ and ‘I was way down a-yonder’, could possibly relax even more, but elsewhere there are crisply sprung Scotch-snap-type rhythms and a jaunty sense of dance.

There’s a surprise habanera in the second-movement Andante of Suk’s Trio, transformed as if for the salon and aptly played here with nonchalance; and Martin’s rarely heard Trio features popular Irish melodies, beginning with a modal tune, complete with gentle drone, and closing in a jig. Each player gets a chance to shine on the disc, and the engineering is first-rate.

EDWARD BHESANIA