The good health of the Catalan chamber

It's a well-known fact that chamber music is in full swing in Catalonia, thanks to groups endorsed by the artistic quality of their members. In this regard, the fact that the Fortuny Trio is made up of three great musicians (Joel Bardolet, Pau Codina, and Marc Heredia) is more than evident. And their second concert as the resident group of the season at the Palau de la Música (the Petit Palau, to be more precise) confirmed this once again.

The program opened with three miniatures by Josep Maria Guix, which marked the premiere of a work based on three paintings by Mariano Fortuny: Fortuny Fragments, which expands the list of musical pieces based on pictorial concepts. Plaster plays in these pieces (Children in the Japanese room, Summer at the Port and Scherzo-Fandango based on The vicarage of the painter from Reus) with the preciousness of the miniature, using the letter of a luminous lyricism and with nods to the great tradition of trios.

The piece by the musician from Reus ("crochet" like Fortuny) gave way to a sensational work that the person signing these lines had not felt live for a long time - too long -: theArchduke of Beethoven, that is to say the I choose in B flat major op. 97 that the Bonn musician wrote—it seems—between 1811 and 1814. The work exudes Beethovenian colossalism, concentrated in a minuscule formation such as the one made up of the violin, the cello and the piano. And it was there, in this authentic trial by fire, where the members of the Fortuny Trio displayed their fiery potential, without forgetting the refinement characteristic of a work that, despite being conceived at the beginning of Romanticism, still has a foundation of sinuous classicism. The same Romanticism, now in its fullness, which constitutes the background and form of theArabesque, op. 18 that Robert Schumann created in 1839 in a long, dense, and intense page. Throughout its four movements, the Fortuny Trio seemed to adapt perfectly to Schumann's indications in the score regarding expressive dynamics: there was contrasting energy, there was fire, and there was a good taste for detail.