The Strad Recommends: Neave Trio: La Mer

THE STRAD RECOMMENDS

The Strad Issue: July 2025

Description: Another imaginative foray into French repertoire from an outstanding trio

Musicians: Neave Trio

Works: Bonis: Soir et Matin. Debussy: La mer (arr. Beamish). Saint-Saëns: Piano Trio no.2

Catalogue number: CHANDOS CHAN20337

French music features on five of the Neave Trio’s seven releases for Chandos, this being its second all-Gallic programme. As convincingly as it approaches the opening of Saint-Saëns’s Piano Trio no.2 – with its dark, sustained, seamlessly exchanging string lines and forest of triads in the piano (rendered with admirable delicacy by Eri Nakamura) – a hair’s width of abandon here separates it from other-worldliness.

The theme acquires more urgency on its return, though, just as the easeful following idea achieves blissfulness second time around. The strong performance continues as the players bring elegance to the 5/8 second movement and a salon-like cosiness to the following Andante con moto. There’s a fun folksiness to the waltz-like penultimate movement and the fugue in the finale is full of light and brilliance.

Mel Bonis’s catalogue has deservedly been receiving attention lately. Touching, nostalgic and initially reminiscent of Saint-Saëns’s own ‘The Swan’, Soir unfolds with beguiling naturalness, while Matin breaks with chromatically fuelled wonder. The performance is beguiling.

The disc culminates in La mer in an arrangement by Sally Beamish – more a reimagination for piano trio than a transcription. The orchestral conception is unmistakable yet there are many small revelations of detail, a sharper articulation here, a newly revealed ostinato there. The playing is as idiomatic as it is virtuosic.

EDWARD BHESANIA