Beethoven Trio Enchants With Refinement

Nowadays, when a group of young chamber musicians takes the stage, you almost expect a certain display of muscle. It’s fairly common in these rock ‘n’ roll times.

But the young Beethoven Trio Vienna has gone the other way. Its playing is super-refined and doesn’t make much room for muscle, aggression, overstatement or harsh sounds. In its performances of piano trios by Beethoven, Ravel and Schubert, in a Music Guild concert at Pierce College Monday, this approach worked beautifully most of the time.

With Christiane Karajeva, the Beethoven Trio Vienna has a fascinating pianist. She coaxes the notes out of the keyboard without losing rhythmic point and purpose. She has an infinite variety of touch and color and uses it perceptively. Banging is beyond (or beneath) her, and even with the piano lid fully open, she never blanketed her delicate string partners--violinist Markus Wolf and cellist Yves Savary--but, rather, supported them with streams of lucid detail.

Wolf and Savary refused to bear down on their bows, producing silken threads of tone and crisp passage work. In Beethoven’s “Kakadu” Variations, this all sounded a little wan, its simple theme rendered more inane than naive.

But in Ravel’s Trio and Schubert’s E-flat Trio, the results were magnetic. The Ravel became a clockwork study, intricate, not the heavily perfumed and heaving thing it often is. Schubert’s Trio unwound in all its amiable, tuneful splendor, its climaxes tightly sprung, not thunderous. These last two works showed the advantages of the Beethoven Trio Vienna’s approach: It draws listeners into a performance, fully engaging them; it doesn’t merely entertain.

* The Beethoven Trio Vienna performs the same program tonight at 8, Wilshire-Ebell Theatre, 4401 W. 8th St. $7-$24. (310) 275-9040.