Trio Gaspard Haydn: Complete Piano Trios, Vol. 2

Described by Gramophone as ‘an album of joyous, imaginative music-making that whets the appetite for future instalments’, the first volume of Trio Gaspard’s Haydn cycle was enthusiastically received by buyers and critics alike. As in the case of that first volume, the Trio has designed a programme for the second volume that works in its own right, and features trios from all periods of Haydn’s career. Three later works (Nos 33, 35, and 45) were all composed in 1794 / 95 and contrast with the early trio No. 7, from c. 1760, whilst the trio No. 21, from the composer’s middle period, was written in 1784 / 85. As in Volume 1, Trio Gaspard chooses to end the programme with another contemporary work reflective of the programme – in this instance For Gaspard by the cellist-composer Leonid Gorokhov. The first of the two movements (a common structure in Haydn’s trios), ‘Hidden D’ (a play on the popular reference to the ‘Haydn D’ major Cello Concerto) reworks numerous themes from that piece, among many others!

Between 2008 and 2014 Universal Classics reissued nearly all of Martha Argerich’s Deutsche Grammophon recordings in a series of boxed sets, largely according to genre (solo, chamber, duo, concerto, and so forth). There also was a box containing her output for the Philips label and another devoted to her complete recordings with Claudio Abbado. All of this material appears anew in DG’s 48-CD collection Martha Argerich: The Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, with the addition of the 1977 Stravinsky Les Noces conducted by Leonard Bernstein, the Chopin and Schumann duos with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and more recent releases like the Berlin and Cologne Chopin Radio Recordings, the 2014 duo piano recital with Daniel Barenboim, and the 4-disc Lugano Concertos collection. The discs are packaged in original-jacket facsimiles and sequenced in more-or-less chronological order by release date.