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

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The old showbiz proverb about leaving the people wanting more than have rarely seemed so broadly applicable as it did Lord'S Day night, during the gorgeous, bittersweet nightshade word of farewell visual aspect by the Beaux Humanistic Discipline Trio.

With one batting order or another, this ensemble have got been dishing up vibrant, elegant chamber music for more than than one-half a century, and we still haven't had enough. We could certainly make with more than public presentations as glossy and robust as the group's offers of music by Dvorák, Franz Schubert and György Kurtág.

But no. This is the end of the route for the Beaux Humanistic Discipline Three - the current circuit winds up in August at the Tanglewood Music Festival, where the three made its introduction in July 1955 - and after that, all we'll have got are recordings and memories.

Sunday's recital, presented in Herbst Theater by Chamber Music San Francisco, will assist with the latter. As I walked out of the hall, I overheard 1 frequenter state to her hubby in strikingly dear tones, "That is a concert I will never forget."

It wasn't difficult to understand why. It's rare to hear chamber music delivered with such as an intoxicant blend of glossy tonic beauty and expressive vigor; even without a contrite sense of the occasion, Sunday's narration would have got been one for the books.

The current rank - fiddler Daniel Hope, cellist Antonio Meneses and initiation piano player Menahem Pressler - have been together since 2002, and the grade to which the three participants now work in bicycle-built-for-two is astonishing. When the three performed here in 2005, Hope's farinaceous sound and rhythmical restlessness made a bracing counterforce to his colleagues' more than urbane attack but one that was still not entirely incorporate into the ensemble.

Three old age later, the passage is complete. In Dvorák's "Dumky" Trio, the twine participants joined to constitute what sounded like a single voice with two melodic lines, and Pressler's crisp, shapely parts from the pianoforte made a gentle complement.

Even more than powerful was the group's bid of dramatic tone of voice throughout what can sometimes look a structurally level gathering of common people melodies.

Much of the piece was delivered in hushed tones, not so much hushed as charged with a sense of fantastic anticipation. In each subdivision of pregnant piano was the promise of something exciting about to explosion onto the scene; and the explosions, when they came, were all the more than cogent for being short-lived.

Schubert's E-Flat Trio, Op. 100, runs on a bigger scale, and the ensemble took the measurement of its expansive paragraphs superbly. The first motion sounded athletic and cordial but never clattery, and Meneses delivered the gap tune of the slow motion with a refined and slightly plaintive sense of urgency.

Between these two giants came a bantam but resistless jewel, Kurtág's bluntly titled "Work for Piano Trio." Like nearly all the music of this 82-year-old Magyar master, this is an exercising in compressed apothegm - the piece runs scarcely three minutes, and the grouping played it twice.

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

The comparing to Webern's similarly compact rhetoric is unavoidable. The difference is that Webern's authorship is difficult and diamond-like, with borders crisp adequate to set your oculus out. Kurtág's phrases, cloaked in shadow, mutter inconclusively and melt away.

Sunday's programme acknowledged the historical nature of the event. Presenter Daniel Levenstein began the eventide with a announcement from Mayor Gavin Newsom declaring Lord'S Day to be Beaux Humanistic Discipline Three Day in San Francisco.

And when the Franz Schubert was over, the audience seemed loth to allow the performing artists go. The encores included extracts from threes by Joseph Haydn and Beethoven, and when Pressler announced the first encore - the scherzo from Shostakovich's Three No. Two - he said, "Obviously, we can't play the whole piece."

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

For golf course to audio cartridge holders of the Beaux Humanistic Discipline Trio, travel to .

E-mail Joshua Kosman at .