By Spencer Allman

CONCERTS for Craswall puts on concerts in the relatively remote southwestern corner of Herefordshire. One such this year was the chamber music recital at Dore Abbey in the Golden Valley on 2 July.

A first-rate group of young musicians from separate backgrounds came together to play works by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Elgar. The string trio format has largely been outflanked by the string quartet but the first item tonight, Beethoven’s early Op. 9 No 1, is music of such profound maturity that it is surprising why the composer never turned his attention to this specific genre again.

This was both a sensitive and occasionally vivacious reading of Beethoven’s rather experimental score. Next up was a rendition of the second piano trio of Mendelsohn. Mendelssohn has been gradually bouncing back into the limelight in recent years after a surely undeserved period of relative neglect. This particular piece – admittedly boisterous and sometimes syrupy in parts – was performed with dashing virtuosity.

The final offering of the evening was Elgar’s Piano Quintet. Elgar wrote very little for the piano, a trait he shares - almost uncannily – with a number of other acclaimed British composers, and the keyboard writing in this work is decidedly hesitant. Nevertheless, it is the piano that is the driving force of the piece – rarely prominent but always ushering the other instrumentalists along.

Throughout, these splendid musicians paid close attention to dynamic markings, simultaneously managing to let this superb music breathe.

The first movement is a kind of fin de siècle lamentation mixed with palm court-like passages of exuberance and just a hint of menace. But in the adagio that follows we enter an abyss of something like desperation. The ever-portrayed image of Elgar as a moustachioed Edwardian gentleman (upper lip appropriately stiff) is totally belied by the sorrow that frequently pervades his output. The achingly beautiful main theme of the movement, passed as it is between the strings, must have stunned those in the audience hearing the work for the first time.

The quintet was written towards the end of the First World War, but its sense of the uncertain and of the tragic seemed to me strikingly relevant tonight. The performance was probably the best I have heard, and in the stark and venerable surroundings of the Abbey sounded something like a prayer.