The Prometheus Trio exposes, transcends, conceals

The ostinato at the outset of Martinu’s First Piano Quartet, as the Prometheus Trio and guest violist Matthew Michelic played it Monday, limped violently. Michelic, violinist Timothy Klabunde, cellist Scott Tisdel and pianist Stefanie Jacob applied such weight to Martinu’s disjointed syncopation and accents as to suggest dysfunction. Half-broken machinery clanking on with cracked gears. Leg-wounded soldiers struggling in forced-march retreat.

I’m wary of mixing up an artist’s biography with his work, but the Czech composer wrote this quartet in New York in 1942, just after a harrowing escape from France, through Spain and Portugal, amid thousands of other refugees fleeing the German invasion.

This dense, furious chamber music, with just a little respite in the folkish, nostalgic portions of the Adagio, came off with autobiographical intensity in this wild performance. Ensemble might have frayed around the edges here and there amid the high-speed explosion of fragmentary themes and gnarly rhythms of the last movement, but no matter. Ferocity meant everything, and this playing was fierce.

Martinu’s grittiness contrasted sharply with the ecstatic lyricism that surges through Fauré’s Second Piano Quartet (1885-87). Beauty counts here, and Klabunde and Michelic, especially, fully realized the burgeoning beauty in Fauré’s soaring lines, tinged in about equal measure in glowing, serene modal harmonies or dark Romantic minor modes.

How well the players attuned themselves to the essences of both works, to the violence of Martinu’s whiplash rhythms and heart-rending dissonances and to Fauré’s flooding delirium.

The Prometheans gave themselves just as completely to Haydn’s clarity, grace and civility. They played both the Trio in E-flat minor (in just one movement) and the Trio in G so transparently that you could just about analyze the melodies as they evolved (here an inversion, there a sequence, now a new harmony…). Precision does count with Haydn, and Klabunde, Tisdel and Jacob, were utterly precise in just the right nonchalant manner.

Martinu meant to expose the effort, Haydn intended to conceal it and Fauré meant to transcend it. The Prometheus and friends understood and met their intentions.

A crowd that completely packed Bader Hall at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music (where the Prometheus is in residence) stood and cheered until they got an encore, a lovely reading of Sibelius’ Valse Triste.

This program will be repeated at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 4. Reservations recommended; call the conservatory at 414 276-5760 or visit the Prometheus page at the conservatory’s website.