Music review: Beaux Arts' last S.F. concert

The old showbiz adage about leaving the people wanting more has rarely seemed so broadly applicable as it did Sunday night, during the gorgeous, bittersweet farewell appearance by the Beaux Arts Trio.

With one lineup or another, this ensemble has been dishing up vibrant, elegant chamber music for more than half a century, and we still haven't had enough. We could certainly do with more performances as sleek and robust as the group's offerings of music by Dvorák, Schubert and György Kurtág.

But no. This is the end of the road for the Beaux Arts Trio - the current tour winds up in August at the Tanglewood Music Festival, where the trio made its debut in July 1955 - and after that, all we'll have are recordings and memories.

Sunday's recital, presented in Herbst Theatre by Chamber Music San Francisco, will help with the latter. As I walked out of the hall, I overheard one patron say to her husband in strikingly heartfelt tones, "That is a concert I will never forget."

It wasn't hard to understand why. It's rare to hear chamber music delivered with such an intoxicating blend of silky tonal beauty and expressive vigor; even without a rueful sense of the occasion, Sunday's recital would have been one for the books.

The current membership - violinist Daniel Hope, cellist Antonio Meneses and founding pianist Menahem Pressler - has been together since 2002, and the degree to which the three players now work in tandem is astonishing. When the trio performed here in 2005, Hope's gritty sound and rhythmic impatience made a bracing counterforce to his colleagues' more urbane approach but one that was still not entirely integrated into the ensemble.

Three years later, the transition is complete. In Dvorák's "Dumky" Trio, the string players joined to form what sounded like a single voice with two melodic lines, and Pressler's crisp, shapely contributions from the piano made a gentle complement.

Even more powerful was the group's command of dramatic tone throughout what can sometimes seem a structurally flat assemblage of folk melodies.

Much of the piece was delivered in hushed tones, not so much subdued as charged with a sense of wondrous anticipation. In each section of pregnant pianissimo was the promise of something exciting about to burst onto the scene; and the explosions, when they came, were all the more potent for being short-lived.

Schubert's E-Flat Trio, Op. 100, operates on a larger scale, and the ensemble took the measure of its expansive paragraphs superbly. The first movement sounded athletic and hearty but never clattery, and Meneses delivered the opening melody of the slow movement with a refined and slightly mournful sense of urgency.

Between these two behemoths came a tiny but irresistible jewel, Kurtág's bluntly titled "Work for Piano Trio." Like nearly all the music of this 82-year-old Hungarian master, this is an exercise in compressed aphorism - the piece runs scarcely three minutes, and the group played it twice.

But within its few sparse phrases, the music enfolds multitudes. It whispers, it insinuates, it gets under your skin; a few short melodic fragments and textural gestures stand in for great oratory.

The comparison to Webern's similarly compact rhetoric is unavoidable. The difference is that Webern's writing is hard and diamond-like, with edges sharp enough to put your eye out. Kurtág's phrases, cloaked in shadow, murmur inconclusively and fade away.

Sunday's program acknowledged the historic nature of the event. Presenter Daniel Levenstein began the evening with a proclamation from Mayor Gavin Newsom declaring Sunday to be Beaux Arts Trio Day in San Francisco.

And when the Schubert was over, the audience seemed loath to let the performers go. The encores included excerpts from trios by Haydn and Beethoven, and when Pressler announced the first encore - the scherzo from Shostakovich's Trio No. 2 - he said, "Obviously, we can't play the whole piece."

"Why not?" came a cry from the balcony. "It's only 9 o'clock!"

For links to audio clips of the Beaux Arts Trio, go to www.beauxartstrio.org.