Magically, tragically, didn’t they do well?

which blended seamlessly with Cohen’s warm cello lines and the lightness of Sato’s violin. The balance of power was more even in the skipping finale which echoed the swagger of the menuetto in Mozart’s Jupiter symphony.

But it was Beethoven who really pushed at the virtuosic boundaries in his Piano Trio in C minor Op 1 No 3. The musicians’ pitch-perfect account ticked all the boxes from the allegro’s waltzing lilt and beautifully ornamented melodies to the declamatory statements of the menuetto and the finale’s sizzling dynamic extremes.

It was more sturm und drang than Hadyn’s filigreelight Piano Sonata in G minor Hob XVI.44. Its two short movements were played by Beuzuidenhout in a crisp and fluid style, especially the wistful moderato.

What is fascinating about this early music series is the instruments themselves and Paul Mcnaulty’s modern copy of the 1805 Anton Walter & Sohn fortepiano was a joy to listen to in Buzuidenhout’s expert hands. SUSAN NICKALLS The Studio JJJJ Samuel Beckett meets trash television, says the quote on the programme for Real Magic; and it’s hard to think of a better description of this brilliant and painfully searching show from Forced Entertainment, the Sheffield-based performance company led by Tim Etchells.

It specialises in cutting-edge expressionistic performance, often with an absurdist edge; and there were a few early departures and a solitary “boo”, as they made their International Festival debut at The Studio on Tuesday, with the first Edinburgh performance of this brilliant and relentless study of what is going on in the game shows that play such a key role in our screen culture.

In Real Magic, the three performers – Jerry Killick, Richard Lowdon, Clare Marshall – take it in turns to play the contestant, the questionmaster and the assistant, repeating again and again

0 Game shows and dignity put under the spotlight in Real Magic a preposterous sequence of events in which the contestant attempts – without success – to guess which word the assistant is thinking of.

So sometimes the mood is showbiz-ridiculous, with chicken suits. Sometimes it acquires the glittery pseudo-sophistication of a magic show; sometimes it becomes utterly tragic, lost in its own futility. And always, through the sheer brilliance of their performance – backed by shifting sequences of sound and light, looped applause and canned laughter – the company are exploring the powerful patterns of bullying

They dovetailed immaculately in the Goldbergs, however, taking on and spinning forward Bach’s intricate interplay of voices, and bringing a ringing clarity to the canonic movements. In their opening Aria they conjured the austere beauty of a viol consort, but in later movements there was an almost Tchaikovskian orchestral richness to their trio arrangement. Their opening Schoenberg Trio gripped from its ferociously intense opening and dared you to look away. These were astonishingly accomplished, brilliantly perceptive performances. DAVID KETTLE and exploitation, of impossible tasks framed as tests of brain-power or character, and of the contestants’ stubborn complicity in their own humiliation, that run through game-show culture.

As the late, great Bruce Forsyth used to sing, life is the name of the game; and as a point of departure for debate about 21st-century attitudes to ourselves and to human dignity, it’s hard to imagine a show more brilliant than this – or more essential to anyone who cares about theatre, and the way we live now. JOYCE MCMILLAN

However, their witty, song cycle emerges as more of an empathetic glimpse through the keyhole than a monument to Hollywood excess as Cocker speak-sings of the travails of former residents Jean Harlow, Howard Hughes and Mark Twain’s daughter Clara Clemens over Gonzales’s minimalist, melancholic figures and the strings of Hamburg’s Kaiser Quartett.

Their meditations on the loneliness of these sequestered stars are accompanied by archive footage, music video miniatures, directed by Auge Altona, and the sage voice-over of film historian David Thomson, and interspersed with theatrical flourishes. An audience member is screen tested, Cocker goes walkabout and dancer Maya Orchin swirls mesmerically under staccato strobes.

Perhaps deliberately, given that one of the show’s themes is the need to have it all at once, there is a little too much baggage to pack together entirely coherently, but this is one hotel stay that will linger in the memory. FIONA SHEPHERD