Smetana: Piano Trio; Liszt: Elegies

This resolutely elegiac disc offers an opportunity to discover, through their chamber music, the dark side of two composers who are not often associated. Smetana s primary purpose was to give utterance to a cry of pain at his daughter s death through the medium of the piano trio. In the Liszt pieces, elegies and funeral gondolas remind us of the deeply human and tormented nature of a composer haunted by death and who, more than any other, was capable of expressing its icy smile. The Trio Wanderer realize all this in deeply moving performances.