The Strad Recommends: Leonidas Kavakos, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax: Beethoven for Three vol.4

THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: October 2025

Description: Three stellar artists continue their Beethoven conversation

Musicians: Leonidas Kavakos (violin) Yo-Yo Ma (cello) Emanuel Ax (piano)

Works: Beethoven: Symphony no.1 (arr.Shai Wosner); Piano Trios: no.5 ‘Ghost’, no.4 ‘Gassenhauer’

Catalogue number: SONY CLASSICAL 19802908842

These players continue their ‘Beethoven for Three’ series of piano trios and symphony arrangements with the First Symphony, in which they catch all the freshness and exuberance of Shai Wosner’s arrangement, which has both the sensitivities of chamber music and the power of Beethoven’s big-boned tuttis.

There is delicacy and good humour in the Andante, before the jolly Menuetto and happy, bustling finale.

After the energetic opening of the ‘Ghost’ Trio op.70 no.1 there is leisurely melodic playing. The weaving chromatic lines of the development have an air of mystery and the coda has a dreamy expansiveness.

The Largo assai progresses with a sense of strange inevitability in its rise and fall of dynamics and later in its vivid drama, as the playing becomes more muscular and emphatic. There is a constant alternation of energetic joy and poetic sensitivity in the finale.

Kavakos takes over clarinet duties in the piano trio version of the Clarinet Trio op.11. The playing here is immaculately clean and lyrical, the staccatos clipped, the sforzandos punchy but tonally focused.

The Adagio is a delight, genial and relaxed, with finely sculpted string melodies neatly offset by Ax’s twinkling filigree playing. In the finale the second variation, for strings alone, has simple charm.

The musicians are captured in a warm and detailed recorded sound.

TIM HOMFRAY