Review: Fujita Piano Trio, Huddersfield Music Society ****

Piano trio repertoire can be flimsy, and needs a single-minded group who can select the stronger pieces to bring it off.

One such is the Fujita Piano Trio, who played from memory and with formal courtesy and restraint.

They made the opening Andante of Haydn's Gypsy Rondo Trio delicate and well mannered. They injected a touch of tension into its usually smiley slow movement, and their gypsy themes in the finale were buttoned up, as

though the spirit of the desolate Shostakovich that followed was already hanging over proceedings.

Basically, Shostakovich works by opposing reflection and action using 19th-century lyrical language. In his E minor Trio – composed in 1944 in grief for the death of his friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, and anger at the uncovering of Nazi death camps by Soviet troops – the Fujitas emphasised the lyrical.

They developed the opening Andante carefully, underplaying its grimly jocular aspects. Its Largo was expressive.

The Fujitas made Mendelssohn's D minor Trio a polite Victorian parlour piece. The opening Molto Allegro was reined-in, the Scherzo was about creatures more substantial than the fairies it usually conjures, and the finale rattled along with good humour.