Throughout music history, the city of Vienna has been a hot spot for musical performance, with Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert among its masters. Two centuries later, Vienna is still exporting great music, and a sample came to Richardson Auditorium last Wednesday night as part of the Princeton University Summer Concert series. The Vienna Piano Trio performed three works for piano, violin, and cello, showing precision and a solid command of 18th and 19th century repertoire.

The other ensembles heard in the Summer Concert series this year have maintained blended repertoires of traditional and contemporary (event, avant-garde) music, but the Vienna Piano Trio is firmly rooted in the classics. Violinist Wolfgang Redik, cellist Matthias Gredler, and pianist Stefan Mendl have compiled a discography of the great masters of chamber music, including the piano trios of Franz Josef Haydn.

The Vienna Trio’s performance of Haydn’s Piano Trio in A Major was clean from the outset, beginning with exacting chords from the piano. Mr. Mendl showed a very light touch on the keyboard, with even fingering on running passages and a subtle left hand. Mr. Mendl demonstrated a great deal of character in his piano accompaniment, complementing a sweet violin sound from Mr. Redik. Haydn’s trio included stylistic musical teasing, which was well executed by the Vienna ensemble.

Throughout the three movements, the strength of Mr. Mendl remained the evenness of his hands, which enabled a concise and well-timed dialog between piano and violin. Mr. Gredler drew a rich sound from the lower register of the cello, especially in the darker second movement. The Vienna Trio also demonstrated their quick playing in the third movement as they brought the Haydn work to a fast and furious close.

The Viennese work paired with the Haydn Trio was Franz Schubert’s Piano Trio in B-flat Major, composed less than a year before the composer’s death. Despite Schubert’s physical suffering at the time, his late works, including this trio, were infused with expressive melodies and a bit of playfulness. The Vienna Trio brought out well the lyrical second subject of the first movement, allowing the silences between musical thoughts to become a bit longer each time. The second movement, Andante, resembled a typically Schubertian lieder for cello and piano, with Mr. Gredler deriving the most from the phrases, evenly accompanied by Mr. Mendl. The full ensemble sound and musical drama showed Beethoven’s presence in the same city (he died shortly before Schubert began work on this trio) and the Vienna ensemble illuminated the saucy refrain of the closing Rondo with its especially Beethoven-esque dash to the finish.

French musical impressionist Maurice Ravel is not a composer one normally associates with Vienna, but he did travel to the city many times, and had a great regard for Viennese musical heritage. From this tradition Ravel may have borrowed the piano trio form, but his Piano Trio in A Minor was colored by a far darker influence than light-hearted Viennese court life. From the time of this trio’s beginnings in 1913 to its premiere in 1915, France moved from the joie de vivre of the early 20th century to immersion in World War I. Ravel was forced to rush completion of this trio in order to enlist in the military, and the four movements of this work are almost a pastiche of world-wide musical influence.

In this work, Ravel took an old form and added a new harmonic twist, and the Vienna Trio brought out well all the nuances and impressionistic musical tricks. Mr. Mendl began the work with a very liquid piano character, soon joined by unison violin and cello. Mr. Gredler’s cello part showed more range than the other two works, with long melodic lines in both stringed instruments and more use of vibrato. An elegant dialog between the violin and cello smoothed out the Basque irregular meter of the movement.

The second movement, Pantoum, drew its structure from Malaysian poetry, with a great deal of rise and fall in the music and jagged rhythms. This movement was more demanding of the players, and the Vienna Trio moved smoothly into the third movement Passacaille. Mr. Mendl well intoned the funeral march theme in the lowest register of the piano, and the three instruments built intensity well as the movement arched and returned to its funereal roots from the keyboard.

In all three of these works (as well as the Schumann excerpt which served as an encore), the Vienna Piano Trio paid tribute to the precision of the Classical era, while stretching their range into Ravel’s muted instrumental colors. This was clearly an ensemble rooted in the great traditions of the history of music.