Piano trios by Shostakovich / Martin / Bloch – Grieg Trio

Piano trios from the 1920s

Two of the most central figures in Swiss music, Ernest Bloch and Frank Martin, were born within a span of ten years in the same city, Geneva. The distinctive sobriety of that town – it fostered a more famous son, Calvin – reverberates equally in the art of two musicians who emerged from quite different backgrounds; Bloch from the synagogue and Martin from a strict Calvinist congregation led by his father. Interestingly, three of the works recorded here were all written within roughly a year of each other in the 1920s. Three very different composers – Dmitri Shostakovich was at the time an unknown stripling – applied themselves concurrently to the same strictures of a venerable old form, the piano trio. In the case of Shostakovich, the form would be returned to. For Bloch and Martin a first excursion would be the last.

On this album, the well-established and internationally recognized group The Grieg Trio performs these composer’s trios. After a range of successful album the group yet again displays their exceptional musical strengths, either in Bloch’s “Three Nocturnes” with its unmistakably Jewish elements characteristic of the composer’s work in general, or in Martin’s deliciously light and transparent “Trio on Irish Folktunes”. Not to mention their interpretations of the two piano trios by Shostakovich – the c minor and e minor – which undoubtedly will leave any listener baffled.