Audite’s second SACD release with the Trio Testore sheds light on a special side of Russian chamber music: the personal, passionate works for piano trio, both conceived as dedications and memorials, by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. Tchaikovsky composed his only Piano Trio in memory of his mentor and friend Nikolai Rubinstein, paying tribute to Rubinstein's pianistic brilliance in the work's demanding piano part. Rachmaninov took this two-movement work and its fundamentally elegiac character as a model when he composed his First Piano Trio at the age of seventeen.
