Torsten Rasch's collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys for their Trafalgar Square screening of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in June 2004 indicated that here was a composer who very much related to the present. The piano trio premiered at the Cheltenham festival, however, underlined the Dresden-born Rasch's natural affinity with the past: his musical language is essentially the overblown Austro-German Romanticism of Berg, Schönberg and Zemlinsky.
Structurally, this four-movement work is rooted even further back in the classical tradition and, as such, the almost half-hour piece sat easily between trios by Haydn and Mendelssohn. Rasch chooses to opt in and out of the strictures of 12-note technique at will. The result is a piece quite out of its time, though its lyricism and fever of fluid, imaginative detail were vividly communicated by the Emperor Piano Trio.
Amid the high emotional energy and dramatic undertow, the music was at its most arresting when the dense textures collapsed into utterances altogether more terse and austere. These suggested a clarity of vision entirely Rasch's own. That the greatest force emerged from relative economy of means suggested that it is this facet of Rasch's personality (rather than the tendency to overelaborate his material, as happened in the complex finale), that will serve him best in the future.
Violinist So-Ock Kim, cellist Li-Wei and pianist Naomi Iwase bring a remarkable poise and commitment to their playing, already evident in the Haydn Trio in G, Hob XV:25 that began this concert. After the intense focus of the Rasch, they approached Mendelssohn's D minor Trio Op 43 in an understated way; it made the passionate exchanges that then developed all the more spontaneously heartfelt.
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