Orange County Register, by Tim Mangan

IRVINE, CA -- The Smetana Trio, billed as the foremost of today’s Czech chamber ensembles, opened the Philharmonic Society’s chamber music series Saturday at Irvine Barclay Theatre with a clever program. It was an all-Czech agenda, but there wasn’t a note of Dvorák on it. The message was clear enough: There’s more to Czech music than you-know-who.

The group was founded in 1934, one of the original members being the current cellist’s father. It records regularly (for Supraphon) and travels widely. Its performances Saturday had a nice lived-in quality, which is to say naturalness and ease and the sense that no expression was forced, but, on the contrary, merely arrived at in the course of things.

The two string players, violinist Jirí Vodicka and cellist Jan Pálenicek, are a pleasure to hear. Their basic tone has a lightness and slenderness to it that helped give their phrasings a trim and direct quality. They both can bolster the intensity of a line with a quick but compact vibrato. Pálenicek also used his bow tellingly, moving it with extra speed now and then, slicing into a phrase.

At the piano, Jitka Cechová was warm and generous and virtuosic. She partnered the strings without fuss, not making a big deal of it like many pianists in chamber groups do. The group just seems to breath together. Cechová kept the lid of the piano a quarter open (one presumes so that she wouldn’t overpower the strings), but, in this hall at least, it made her articulation a trifle muffled in comparison to the strings. A small thing.

They opened with Josef Suk’s Piano Trio, Op. 2, completed in 1891 when the composer was just 17. It is a lovely work, charming and folksy and, despite its C-minor key, for the most part cheery. It is nicely stitched together, too. It only goes on as long as it has to.

Martinu’s Piano Trio No. 2, which had its premiere in 1950, is a compact work as well, lasting around 17 minutes. The work is fresh and energetic, even restless. The piece, on first acquaintance, seems stuffed with material – rich melodies and rhythmic obsessions – and the compact forms keep it coming at the listener rapidly. Martinu also takes subtle advantage of genre’s scoring possibilities, creating mezzotints and whirring textures.

The West Coast premiere of the “Multicultural Suite” by the young Czech composer Roman Haas (born in 1980) proved witty and lively. A series of dreamy introductions lead successively to an off-kilter waltz, a dramatic bolero and a rip-roaring czardas. Winding up the evening was Smetana’s G-minor Trio, which is, like his string quartet, “From My Life,” an autobiographical work, this one concerning the tragedy of losing his 4-year-old daughter to scarlet fever.

Its sadness is full blown, chromatic and roiling; its nostalgia is melancholy and tender. The composer works through his memories and eventually places the child not out of them, but in an honored place within them, to be cherished.

Here the group’s obvious familiarity with the score – the cellist’s copy was so tattered it might have been a first edition – paid dividends. The musicians knew where they were going and exactly how to get there, without wasted motion, in razor sharp turns and quick sprints.