Yitzhak Yedid Oud Bass Piano Trio (2008)

The music of Mieczys?aw Weinberg continues to be issued, and continues to impress. Like his British counterpart, York Bowen, Weinberg was a composer trapped in time and place, and it is good that their very different musics are now coming to the fore with such regularity. One of the wonderful things about this disc, aside from the committed, intense playing of the instrumentalists, is the sound: crisp and clear, with only a very little reverb, which brings the sound of the instruments into sharp focus and makes the listener pay attention to the music.

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.

With orchestral concerts on hold for the foreseeable future, the Linos Piano Trio’s Stolen Music project takes inspiration from earlier times and brings distilled versions of great orchestral works to smaller spaces.

SOMM Recordings is thrilled to announce Dance!, the debut recording by the Minerva Piano Trio, featuring seminal pieces by Stravinsky and Ravel alongside new works by two British composers, Cheryl Frances-Hoad and Richard Birchall, and Pulitzer Prize-winning American, Caroline Shaw.

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.

After its first album devoted to Schumann’s first two piano trios, the Kungsbacka Piano Trio now presents the conclusion of this series with the Piano Trio No. 3 in G minor, to which they add the Six Studies in Canonic Form, originally for pedal piano and performed here in an arrangement for piano trio, and an early work, the Quartet in C minor for violin, viola, cello and piano, which was only published in 1979.

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.

A good long time ago I reviewed a set of Svetlanov performances of music by Medtner which included, almost as an afterthought, a few examples of compositions by Eduard Nápravnik. The Czech-born composer, like so many of his executant confrères, ended up in St Petersburg where the Russian Schools, an amalgam of native Russian, Czech and Hungarian teaching, thrived during the nineteenth-century and beyond.