Chausson / Vienna Piano Trio - Piano Trios [CD]

Airy, transparent, light as a feather - if any composer's music answers to these attributes, then it is that of Maurice Ravel, including his Piano Trio, even if this work too has it's more serious moments. On it's newest Super Audio album the Vienna Piano Trio brings together this marvelously unique achievement and a very differently gripping trio by Ernest Chausson - a fascinating contrast and one most beautifully celebrated by our Vienna threesome. Chausson composed his trio as an act of defiance. He had abandoned his study of composition without a diploma and had recently retired to the countryside. As if he wanted to show all his critics and especially the jurors of the Prix de Rome what he could do: in the Piano Trio an impetuous artist assumes a revolutionary and romantic expressive stance. This begins already in the impassioned first movement, to whose themes he repeatedly returns during the course of the other parts, and reaches it's high point in the great breadth and unforgettable melodiousness of the third movement.