Amidst the obligatory potted ferns, flags, drapes and stuffy portraits, Perth’s Government House Ballroom — designed by Percy Grainger’s father no less, and sympathetically restored in 2004 — is now a popular venue for chamber music. The relaunched West Australian Piano Trio are the latest group to perform there, and their programme of Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms was the first concert in their 2022 series. Pianist David Wickham, violinist Margaret Blades and cellist Michael Goldschlager, each distinguished performers in their own right, are musically well matched, and together delivered compelling and unfussy accounts of three of the greatest works in the piano trio repertoire.      

West Australian Piano Trio

David Wickham, Margaret Blades and Michael Goldschlager.

Beethoven’s Archduke Trio received a spacious reading. Wickham impressed with his technical finesse and keen ear for balance, and the contributions from the strings were alternately soloistic and textural when they needed to be. Whilst others may seek a more rhetorical performance style and make more of Beethoven’s contrasting material, the West Australian Piano Trio opt for homogeneity, and in so doing capture something...