Tibaud Casals Cortot

It’s a measure of the paucity of recordings of the Cortot-Thibaud-Casals trio – itself a direct result of their deliberately limited repertoire – that this latest release in Naxos’s series has only one performance by the Trio itself. This all-Beethoven affair presents the Archduke Trio, supported by Thibaud and Cortot’s Kreutzer and the only recording ever made by Casals and Cortot as a duo, the Mozart Variations.

In 1905, three musical friends who would later become giants as soloists came together to form a piano trio. After their initial successes, they reserved time each year from their hectic individual careers to meet in London or Paris to play chamber music. Their musical relationship lasted another twenty-nine years, with the three playing together for the last time in 1934. Although their repertoire was relatively small (only thirty-three works were programmed by the trio during their entire existence), they left behind a handful of recordings, that, more than seventy years on, are still benchmarks, and continue to garner enough sales to keep them alive in the catalog.