The recording debut of the David Trio on Stradivarius, this young but already accomplished and esteemed Italian Trio plays two Russian chamber masterpieces which both express the need for mourning. Shostakovich dedicated the Trio No. 2 to the memory of his friend Ivan Sollertinskij.

As Riccardo Risaliti writes in the liner notes: “Perhaps it is the most elegiac of all, I would even say funereal, desperate, ironically macabre in its essential writing, Spartan, conceding little in sentimental expressive openings, strongly contrasting with the language of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. Shostakovich expressed with this work, still more than with others of the same depressed mood, not only the celebration of the funeral of the friend, but his personal condition of existence as an artist forced to work in a setting which was politically extremely dangerous and culturally suffocating”.

The Trio in A minor by Tchaikovsky is dedicated to the memory of Nikolai Rubinstein, the brother of Anton; he, too, was a famous pianist and composer. This is an exceptionally long work, even longer than Beethoven’s Archduke, and it is marked by the strong presence of the piano, which is called upon to perform in a completely non-chamber role. It is formed of only two movements, of generous length, and of a sort of third movement made up of the final variation, then the coda, of the second. The first movement (Pezzo elegiaco) is typified by a painful lyricism; the second (Tema con variazioni) consists of a theme performed by piano followed by 11 variations.