Trio

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce the second volume in the London Bridge Trio’s revealing exploration, recorded live, of the influential musical fraternity known as The Leipzig Circle. Delving deeper into the coterie that coalesced around the husband-and-wife composers Robert and Clara Schumann as Leipzig flourished into becoming the centre of European music making in the 1840s.

There are melodies that accompany us for a lifetime. You twist and turn them, they can inspire, give hope or comfort. For Johann Sebastian Bach [1685-1750] it was a simple hymn: O head full of blood and wounds. He used this melody again and again, in various settings, in some of his greatest works such as the Christmas Oratorio or the St Matthew Passion. It runs through his life as a red thread, like this concept album: Ebenbild is a continuous narrative in which the boundaries between musical genres and between music and language are blurred.

Since their debut as a trio in 1986, Čeněk Pavlík, Marek Jerie and Ivan Klánský have ranked among the finest chamber musicians of their generation. Here, to mark thirty-five years of playing together, the Guarneri Trio Prague immortalise works by Haydn, while celebrating the composer’s eternal youthfulness with all the expressive intensity and spirit that we have come to expect of them.

Listening to this beautifully played collection of Schubert’s piano trios, the two completed ones and the lonely single movements, I realized that this is the one recording I have that was made on fortepiano. Other favorites, including the recordings by the Beaux Arts Trio, the lesser known Trio di Trieste, and the more romantic recording by Arthur Grumiaux, Pierre Fournier, and Nikita Magaloff, are on modern instruments. That wouldn’t matter, perhaps, if the performances on this new disc were less convincing. Jan Vermeulen has been recording the Schubert sonatas to great acclaim. He now has added a recording of the trios that is clearly articulated, impassioned, at times even jaunty.

Since it was founded in 2015, this vivacious trio has revelled in big ideas and committed itself to refreshing great works of the piano trio repertory with a new dynamic. Following its debut recording of the complete Beethoven piano trios, no less, Trio Sōra has now delved into all that Brahms has to offer in the oeuvre for its second album, this Nme on the La Dolce Volta label.

Russian Roots is the début recording of Trio Gaspard for Chandos Records, for which the group is joined by the soprano Katharina Konradi in a diverse and rewarding programme that explores the Russian influence across almost 200 years of music. A selection of Russian folksongs set by Beethoven, Shostakovich’s First Piano Trio and Seven Romances on Poems by Blok, and Weinberg’s Jewish Songs form the backbone of the recital. These are complemented by vocalises (wordless songs) by Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Gubaidulina, and Auerbach.

Young and aspiring musicians devoted to the performance of Baroque music are still having few problems finding composers whose works have remained in the recycle bin of history up until now. Louis-Antoine Dornel was an organist and composer active in Paris in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Much of his music has been lost, but enough records survive to suggest that he was well thought-of in his own day. The set of six suites recorded here was published in Paris in 1709.