“It was always this strange mixture of feeling, ‘OK, there is death somewhere, and there is despair, frustration, whatever, it’s there because we’re human beings’ — and then, next moment, he would be the most silly and joyful person,” she said. “That’s what always made his playing so incredibly touching, because you see the whole range of the human tragedy, and the lightness of life.”
Judging by his recordings, Vogt was a heartfelt soloist, excelling in the Bach–Schubert–Brahms lineage, yet he was arguably at his finest as a chamber musician; even the tone he gleaned from a piano — compassionate, never domineering — seems to invite collaboration. The Schubert album is the latest in a peerless series of releases with the Tetzlaffs that bears witness to a relationship not just between three artists of stature, but among intimates with a common, fearless commitment to expression.
“It’s something that’s a bit hard to understand totally from the outside; there was a very strong symbiosis,” Reijo Kiilunen, the founder and managing director of Ondine, said of the trio’s recording sessions, in which they appeared to speak “a special language” with one another. “You simply hear it in their playing.”
Before the Schubert, Vogt and the Tetzlaffs had essayed the three Brahms trios, as well as two by Dvorak; with Christian alone, there were accounts of sonatas by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms. There is never the feeling, in any of those interpretations, that the instrumentalists are competing for the limelight or trying to impress anyone, least of all the listener; they are sharing the music with one another.
One of those recordings has become especially poignant since it was made in 2015: a searing reading of Brahms’s Violin Sonata in G, which was also the last piece that Vogt and Christian played together, as nurses gathered to hear them perform a week or so before the pianist’s death.
There is one passage, in the first movement, that movingly illustrates their partnership. It seems simple enough — the violin strums, like a guitar, as the piano adopts the searching main theme — and most duos play it simply, as a basic question of foreground and background. Yet Vogt’s tone is soft, withdrawn, as if he does not want the attention to fall entirely on himself, but would rather draw the ear to the support that Christian is offering, the essential accompaniment to his mournful song. There is no ego.
