Tchaikovsky : Piano trio; Viktor Kissine: Zerkalo ECM New Series 476 4171 ****

Tchaikovsky so disliked the combination of piano and solo strings that he called listening to it "torture". He said, "I cannot explain this physiological peculiarity; I simply state it as a fact." So it came as a real surprise even to Tchaikovsky when he began to write a piano trio. And when he had finished he worried that he might actually have "arranged music of a symphonic character as a trio". The work is elegiac in tone (dedicated "to the memory of a great artist", Nikolai Rubinstein), and, especially through the piano writing, often threatens to overload in texture and emotion. Kremer, Dirvanauskaite and Buniatishvili manage to tame its excesses without compromising its epic ambitions. The lingering, drifting manner of Viktor Kissine's 2009 Zerkalo (The Mirror) is like its the polar opposite. See url.ie/7ebo