The KLR Trio: A Coral Anniversary
The Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio discuss 35 years together, new music, their enthusiasm for the next generation, and why they’re never going to learn the Rachmaninov Trio No. 2
The Zwilich will also be one of three new pieces to be performed in New York City next season by the KLR Trio, who are celebrating a remarkable 35 years together.
The trio has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Zwilich, giving the first performances of her piano trio, double concerto, triple concerto, and septet. “She said she always wanted to write for this combination of the Trout Quintet,” cellist Sharon Robinson explains.
Don’t, however, call it a “double-bass quintet”—violinist Jaime Laredo suggests “piano quartet with bass” and pianist Joseph Kalichstein swiftly adds, “ala Trout!”
Call it what you will. In one movement of the new quintet, Zwilich looks mischievously back at her musical inspiration. “The second movement is a blues piece,” Kalichstein says. “It’s called ‘The Moody Trout.’”
The KLR Trio is the exact opposite of moody when I meet the members in London immediately before their appearance on BBC Radio 3’s popular early evening “In Tune” show. There’s a coziness about the three of them as they crowd together in a corner of the Radio 3 green room. They complete each other’s sentences, prompt each other for stories, gently tease each other—all characteristics of a happy, long-term marriage—and, of course, Laredo and Robinson are married to each other.
Famously, their first public performance as a trio was at Carter’s Presidential Inauguration in January 1977. The real first “date,” though, came the year before when Kalichstein stepped in for an ailing Rudolf Firkusny in a concert featuring of the Dvorak piano quintet and one of the piano quartets.
“I had played the quintet with Jossie [Laredo and Robinson’s nickname for Kalichstein] several years before, so I knew that he knew the piece,” Laredo recalls. “We called and asked him if he knew the piano quartet, and he said, no, but he’d be happy to learn it. And he did, in two days!”
“And it was great!” Robinson chimes in.
“That’s when we were all young and foolish,” says Laredo with a mock sigh.
That summer, Laredo and Robinson were on South American tour with a Uruguayan pianist. “We thought how nice it would be to have an ongoing chamber group. The first person we thought of was Jossie,” Robinson says. “So we asked him. He said, give me a couple of weeks to think about it, and seemed a little bit nonchalant.”
“I called the next day,” says Kalichstein, as his colleagues look amused. “Well, I was backstage! I was playing a Mozart concerto, give me a break.”
Still, “none of us had any inkling that 35 years later we’d be sitting together and still playing,” Robinson says.
I’m hardly the first journalist to ask about the trio’s very long name. “We tried Heifetz-Piatagorsky-Rubinstein, but it was already taken,” jokes Kalichstein in his gentle Israeli accent.
Laredo has a more serious answer: “My feeling about it is that I felt that the trio was the trio. I didn’t want it to be like a name—‘the Jersey City Trio’—because it has remained the three of us, and that’s it. If one of us quits, then that’s the end of the trio.”
Over the course of 35 years, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio has performed and recorded most of the standard trio literature, and commissioned music from Richard Danielpour, Arvo Pärt, and Leon Kirchner, and others. The KLR Trio recently released a four-disc set of the Brahms trios, and their recordings of Ravel, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven (some of which are being reissued on KOCH International Classics) are benchmarks. Reviewing their Beethoven trio cycle in 2007 for this magazine, Strings contributor Edith Eisler remarked, “The players seem to feel as one, seamlessly trading and taking over voices and phrases, building up dynamic and expressive intensity in unbroken lines.”
Somewhat surprisingly, there are still a few major trios not in their repertory. It’s understandable that they’ve not played all of the 45 Haydn piano trios. “I’m very lucky, Sharon loves them, too. Some cello players don’t,” Kalichstein says. But Smetana? It’s odd, Laredo agrees. “I know I’m never going to get to learn the bigger Rachmaninov [the Trio élégiaque, No. 2, in D minor, Op. 9], but the Smetana we got to learn while we can still vibrate.”
“. . . and that piece, you do need to vibrate,” Kalichstein agrees.
The Fauré Trio also is not on the list. “You know, I love Fauré, I adore both piano quartets, but the trio I could never warm up to,” Laredo says.
Kalichstein explains, “Fauré more than anyone else has great differences between the great works and the not-so-great works. The A minor violin sonata is a jewel, unbelievable . . . .”
“. . . .and the E minor violin sonata is not a jewel at all,” says Laredo, finishing Kalichstein’s thought.
After 35 years together, do the members of KLR Trio simply read each other’s minds in rehearsal?
“We do, but we still work all the time,” Kalichstein says.
Robinson elaborates, “There’s a lot of discussion. Many pieces we come back to and they have grown on their own, but with some we’re still having big discussions about, say, the second theme and why is that in a different tempo?”
“When one of us does not rethink something, one of the others does,” Laredo says. “We were rehearsing the ‘Ghost’ Trio the other day and were amazed at how we keep changing it. We keep wondering, why did we do that, that’s silly!”
The players find new scholarly editions—such as the Bärenreiter Schubert trios—interesting, but they’re anything but unthinking slaves to urtext. “I think that’s why all three of us love to teach, because it makes you question,” Kalichstein says.
Kalichstein has taught for many decades at the Juilliard School, while Robinson and Laredo have been teaching at Indiana University since 2005, Laredo having moved there after several decades at the Curtis Institute. “It’s amazing how much I’ve learned from teaching,” Laredo says. “There are things that I’ve taken for granted all my life that have never been a problem for me. Then this wonderful violinist who’s playing for me has a problem with something, and I think to myself, how can I fix that?”
All three players shun the authoritarian teaching approach. Laredo tells of a student who asked him where he could get his fingerings and bowings. “I said, what do you mean? You learn it on your own, and then you come to the first lesson and then we’ll work on it. Lots of my students have really appreciated that. . . .”
“. . . later on,” interrupts Robinson with a laugh. “They can choose all sorts of wrong things and we’ll correct it,” she says. “But then once they know how to learn something, they can teach it themselves anything. I’m trying to teach them how to teach themselves, really. We all have to be self-critical, that’s how we grow.”
Their interest in the next generation of players is also demonstrated by a trio award established in their name by the Chamber Music Society of Detroit. So far, four young trios have received the biennial award. It’s a different kind of award. “None of the trios know they are being considered,” Laredo says.
There’s no competition, no application, just recommendations reviewed by two members of the trio and “a very distinguished panel,” including Leon Fleisher, Michael Tree, and Jonathan Biss.
Robinson gets to make the phone call telling a trio they’ve won. She loves to do it,” Laredo says.
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