Piano Trio

Beethoven’s Op. 1 Piano Trios are startling in their freshness and forcefulness, but there is a lot more to them than that. For one thing, they teem with witty touches, something that is brought out by performances like these, featuring the George Malcolm Piano Trio. “There cannot be a better Op. 1 by any composer, and the George Malcolm Piano Trio conveys the attractions of these two works with skill and intelligence… You could not fail to enjoy this record.” (Original Gramophone review from 1977) Originally released in 1977, the recording is published here on modern technology for the first time, and fittingly in Beethoven 2020 year. These are fresh, bold and musically great performances. The George Malcolm Piano Trio only lasted three years before the trio’s cellist Kenneth Heath died; this is their only recording and is a true testament of a wonderful ensemble partnership, full of verve and humor.

Beethoven’s Op. 1 Piano Trios are startling in their freshness and forcefulness, but there is a lot more to them than that. For one thing, they teem with witty touches, something that is brought out by performances like these, featuring the George Malcolm Piano Trio. “There cannot be a better Op. 1 by any composer, and the George Malcolm Piano Trio conveys the attractions of these two works with skill and intelligence… You could not fail to enjoy this record.” (Original Gramophone review from 1977) Originally released in 1977, the recording is published here on modern technology for the first time, and fittingly in Beethoven 2020 year. These are fresh, bold and musically great performances. The George Malcolm Piano Trio only lasted three years before the trio’s cellist Kenneth Heath died; this is their only recording and is a true testament of a wonderful ensemble partnership, full of verve and humor.

As one of the most celebrated composers of the late 18th century, Joseph Haydn can lay claim to being ‘father of the piano trio’ alongside that of other genres established in his lifetime such as the symphony and the string quartet. The delightful Divertimento in C major is a youthful work, but the later piano trios recorded here take on a heightened sophistication. Strings and keyboard are given a new independence of character in exquisitely crafted works such as the C minor Trio, with its ‘numerous and sometimes spectacular modulations’, and oscillating enharmonic key changes that foreshadow Schubert can be heard in the Trio in D major.

REFERENCE RECORDINGS is pleased to announce SPANISH IMPRESSIONS, our second album with this elite trio. The Hermitage Piano Trio consists of violinist Misha Keylin, cellist Sergey Antonov, and pianist Ilya Kazantsev. The trio has been praised for its “polished and spirited interpretations” (The Washington Post), “absolute rhythmic precision and dynamic exuberance” (Boston Musical Intelligencer), and “powerful, intelligent and deeply moving performances” (The Seattle Times). Their first album on our label, Rachmaninoff, was nominated for three 2020 GRAMMY® Awards in the categories of Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, Best Engineered Album, Classical, and Producer Of The Year, Classical.

The Hermitage Piano Trio is distinguished by its exuberant musicality, interpretative range, and sumptuous sound—attributes that Reference Recordings expects to be highly appealing to music lovers and audiophiles worldwide. Following a recent performance, The Washington Post raved that “more striking even than the individual virtuosity was the profound level of integration among the players, who showed a rare degree of ensemble from beginning to end.” Based in the United States, the Trio excels at performing an enormous variety of music and has a wide repertoire ranging from Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Arensky, Glinka, and Tchaikovsky to Schubert, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Dvořák, and Brahms.

Internationally acclaimed Gould Piano Trio bring their artistry to trios by Saint-Saëns, and his little known La Muse et le poète on this new recording for Champs Hill. Thirty years separate his Piano Trios Nos 1 & 2, although the first is by no means an immature work the composer was 28, with two symphonies and violin concertos behind him, and his virtuosity as a pianist shines through right from the opening Allegro.

Trio Siciliano chose to record two of the most representative romantic period composers like Johannes Brahms and Antonin Dvorak because they describe two types of romantic expressions. Brahms in his trio describes a symphonic romanticism with powerful rhythmic movements, lyricism and grace, while Dvorak describes feelings and moods through the "dumkas" as a party, a funeral, a landscape … It is like playing folk music with a classic cure.

It was in 1842, his ‘year of chamber music’ that Robert Schumann took on the combination of violin, cello and piano for the first time. He seems to have decided against releasing the resulting Fantasiestücke as a fully-fledged piano trio, however, but later returned to the work, revising it for publication in 1850. The model here is not the large-scale, quasi-symphonic trios of Beethoven or Schubert – instead Haydn’s characteristic trio textures spring to mind, especially in the first two movements where the cello largely follows the piano’s left-hand bass line. By the time the Fantasiestücke was published, Schumann had already written two ‘proper’ piano trios, No. 1 in D minor and No. 2 in F major. According to the composer the second of these ‘makes a friendlier and more immediate impression’ but it is in fact the D minor trio that has long been the more popular: passionate, mainly extrovert and bursting with fine thematic material it is the easiest to grasp on one hearing. Both works are filled to capacity with imitative writing, sometimes conspicuously so but often subtly as if on a subconscious level – an aspect that the members of the Kungsbacka Piano Trio, with more than 20 years of playing together, are able to make the most of.

Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s influence as composer and teacher was profound in Russia and beyond, yet his chamber music has been overshadowed by his operas and orchestral works. The unfinished Piano Trio in C minor was completed by his son-in-law Maximilian Steinberg to reveal a substantial work of considerable depth. César Cui’s charming and lyrical Farniente is an arrangement from a piano original, while Borodin’s Piano Trio in D major is reminiscent of Mendelssohn in its joyous agility and nostalgic beauty.