BBC Music Magazine | Piano Trios

a brilliantly imaginative and clearly recorded programme, presenting the angst-ridden Shostakovich within the context of other works that betray a similar influence from Jewish folk music. The major discovery is the 1945 Trio of Shostakovich’s friend Mieczysław Vainberg. This is a bold and deeply unsettling work betraying the scars of war and in particular the composer’s own tragic circumstances as the only member of his family to have escaped the Nazi atrocities. …Vainberg’s idiom is in some ways even more disconcerting, the wild Jewish frenzy of the Scherzo casting a shadow over the rest of the work and inspiring a sequence of introverted melodic soliloquies which actually seem to anticipate Shostakovich’s late works. …the despair of the Shostakovich sets in with David Geringas’s unnerving but sensitively phrased cello harmonics… the performers respond with razor-sharp precision and insight to the bewildering transformations from anger and aggression in the Scherzo through the funereal despair of the Passacaglia and to the grotesque dance of death in the Finale.