There are recordings that document an era and recordings that transcend it. This three-disc collection from Brilliant Classics — drawing on the legacy of the Oistrakh Trio, that remarkable ensemble of David Oistrakh, cellist Sviatoslav Knushevitsky, and pianist Lev Oborin — belongs to the second category, and anyone who cares about chamber music needs to know it exists.
Start with what these men were. Oistrakh needs no introduction, but the ensemble he formed with Knushevitsky and Oborin in the late 1940s was not a vanity project built around a famous name. All three were serious chamber musicians, trained in a tradition that valued collective listening over individual display. You hear that immediately. The blend is organic, the give-and-take instinctive — there’s no sense of a soloist tolerating his accompanists.
The program here is unapologetically Russian, which suits them perfectly.
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in a minor, op. 50 — that sprawling, magnificent elegy for Nikolai Rubinstein — gets a reading of uncommon breadth and emotional honesty. The opening Moderato con moto unfolds with a long-breathed cantabile in Oistrakh’s violin that seems to have no beginning and no end, just a line extending itself into space. Tchaikovsky called this work “In Memory of a Great Artist,” and great artists are playing it. The variations movement, so often a structural liability in interpretation, holds together here because the trio understands the architecture — they’re building something, not just moving through episodes.
Rachmaninoff’s Trio élégiaque No. 2 in d minor, op. 9, written in grief after Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893, is the longest work on the set and arguably the most emotionally demanding. The Oistrakh Trio plays it with the kind of unrelenting seriousness the music demands — no softening of its cloud-hung bleakness, no prettifying of its belligerence. Rachmaninoff was twenty at the time of composition. The music doesn’t sound like it. It sounds like someone who has already understood that certain losses are permanent, and the ensemble conveys that understanding without melodrama.
Then there’s the Glinka.
The Trio Pathétique in d minor is an early work — Glinka was barely twenty-five — and its character is stylistically curious: Beethoven filtered through Italian opera, the harmonic language of early Romanticism worn lightly. The Oistrakh Trio plays it straight, without condescension, and that’s the right instinct. There are worse things than elegant classicism, and Glinka’s invention here is genuine.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Piano Trio in c minor is the program’s most intriguing puzzle. Rimsky left it incomplete; it was finished by his son-in-law Maximilian Steinberg — a composer of real accomplishment whose symphonies Neeme Järvi began release for Deutsche Grammophon and then, infuriatingly, abandoned. The resulting work is fluent, Germanic in manner, and utterly devoid of the nationalist coloring one associates with either composer’s famous orchestral work. Whether that reflects Rimsky’s intentions or Steinberg’s hand is genuinely hard to say. The Oistrakh Trio doesn’t try to answer the question; they play what’s there, and what’s there is convincing.
Taneyev’s Piano Trio in D, op. 22, is the program’s most undervalued item. Taneyev — contrapuntist, theorist, Tchaikovsky’s most gifted student — wrote on a symphonic scale here, and the music’s Germanic solidity can feel forbidding in lesser hands. Not here. The ensemble’s cumulative intelligence, their understanding of long-range tension and release, makes the work’s architecture feel inevitable rather than labored.
Shebalin’s Piano Trio in A, op. 39 — the runt of the litter, represented by only one movement — is enough to make you wish for the rest. Vissarion Shebalin was a serious composer who suffered serious Soviet harassment; his music deserves better than token representation. What’s here is warmly romantic, late in idiom for 1947, and beautifully played.
The sound is mono, close, slightly pressurized — the acoustic equivalent of a good seat in a small hall. It doesn’t so much surround you as lean toward you. Some will find that intimate; some will want more air. I find it entirely appropriate to this music.
These are not the only recordings of these works. The Rachmaninoff in particular has strong competition — Ashkenazy’s version with Perlman and Harrell has tremendous sweep, and various Russian ensembles have staked their claims over the years. But the Oistrakh Trio’s combination of intellectual authority, tonal refinement, and sheer musical purposefulness is rare enough that comparison feels beside the point. What they offer is not an interpretation of these works. It’s a reckoning with them.
