CD review by Frank Siebert in the magazine ‘Fono Forum’, August 2026.
The title Elegie is somewhat misleading, even if it is an obvious choice given Rachmaninoff’s early Trio élégiaque, composed in 1892. More than an elegiac mood, however, it is a passionate tone that prevails in Rachmaninoff’s work as well as in the trios by Chausson and Babajanyan. All three works reach far beyond the cultivated atmosphere of the salon and bear witness to an intense experience of the world: in Chausson, this manifests itself as late-Romantic longing, in Babajanyan, in a distinctly Armenian-inflected musical language, and in Rachmaninoff, in the melancholy so characteristic of him. The Vienna-based Schwarzenberg Trio approaches these works with commitment, narrative power, and without shying away from emotional intensity. Thus, in the martial passages of the third movement of Babajanyan’s Trio, the two strings merge into a single blazing unity, fuelled by the pianist’s driving, percussive playing. But the three musicians are equally united in their portrayal of the dreamlike sense of being lost in Chausson’s Trio, and succeed in bringing the magical veil of mourning in Rachmaninoff’s Trio vividly to life.
The only slight disappointment is that the cello does not come through as prominently in the recording.