Vienna Piano Trio

Airy, transparent, light as a feather - if any composer’s music answers to these attributes, then it is that of Maurice Ravel, including his Piano Trio, even if this work too has its more serious moments. On its newest Super Audio CD the Vienna Piano Trio brings together this marvellously unique achievement and a very differently gripping trio by Ernest Chausson - a fascinating contrast and one most beautifully celebrated by our Vienna threesome.

Heinrich von Herzogenberg’s search for selfhood finally came to fruition in his two piano trios. After highly promising successes in his native Graz with large-format works modeled on Wagner, the talented young composer experienced a creative and existential crisis from which he first recovered when he turned to Johannes Brahms. The Vienna Piano Trio documents this artistic awakening with a top quality interpretation on SACD adding a new facet to the reception of Herzogenberg’s music after its sleeping beauty’s century of slumbering.

This version of the Tchaikovsky measures up extremely well against its competition; moreover it is (like all chamber recordings from this source) very well balanced. Pianist Stefan Mendl is able to dominate yet become a full member of the partnership throughout. The second movement's variations open gently but soon develop the widest range of style, moving through Tchaikovsky's kaleidoscopic mood-changes like quicksilver and often with elegiac lyrical feeling.

What ensemble could be more predestined for Ludwig van Beethovens piano trios than the Vienna Piano Trio? Following its brilliant beginning with the Trios op. 70, this top ensemble from Vienna now presents the magnificent and mighty Archduke Trio op. 97 in surprisingly close album association with the standout Trio in C minor from op. 1, a work with trailblazing qualities that immediately caught Joseph Haydns attention. And with a beginning that must have immediately irritated listeners of those times: is that still the introduction or already the theme?

Schumann's piano trios are large-scale works, the D minor trio in particular. Its lengthy first movement, which the composer marks "With Energy and Passion", really needs to be played that way, consisting as it does of those long, episodic, non-developing sequences that Schumann for some reason called "sonata form". Don't get me wrong: the music works just fine, but only if it's played with enough sweep and spontaneity that its emotional urgency obliterates its somewhat clunky form. The same holds true for the finale, marked "With Fire". The Vienna Brahms Trio does a good job of conveying the impulsiveness of Schumann's inspiration, and their sense of poetry in the slow movement has just the right "inner" quality.

Alfred Schnittke – author of three operas, ten symphonies as well as numerous concert and chamber works – had a complex and confusing identity. He was born in the Russian city of Engels to a mother descended from the Volga Germans (ethnic Germans recruited by Catherine the Great to settle along the Volga River in the 18th century and later deported by Stalin in 1941) and a Frankfurt-born Jewish journalist of half Lithuanian descent.

The quality of the recorded sound is so perfectly clear on this recording, like finely etched crystal, while at the same time it is so robust and resonant, that it is difficult to believe that the piano played on these two marvelous CDs is a replica of a 1785 Walter fortepiano, a smaller and much more fragile instrument than today's modern concert grand pianos.

Postcards from Vienna: drawn largely from the supreme players of the Wiener Philharmoniker, collected here are the Decca recordings of Viennese chamber music ensembles, including the New Vienna Octet, Vienna Wind Soloists, Wiener Waldhornverein and Vienna Flute Trio, many making their first international appearance on CD. Led by clarinetist Alfred Boskovsky, the first line-up of the Vienna Octet made it's last recording for Decca in 1972, but Boskovsky was behind the revival of the group's name, having already chosen the young members of the Vienna Philharmonic who would carry on the work of the ensemble and it's traditions of superbly mellifluous, silver-toned playing.