Nikolai Roslavets, Dmitri Shostakovich, The Brahms Trio

The tenth and last volume of History of the Russian Piano Trio, the Naxos series recorded by The Brahms Trio, is subtitled Soviet Avant-garde. It sets the Piano Trio No. 4 of Nikolay Roslavets, written in 1927, beside the two trios of Dmitry Shostakovich. Roslavets built his own system of what he called synthetic chords to replace traditional tonality, helped lead the Association for Contemporary Music and, as editor at the state music publisher in the 1920s, approved the scores it printed. By the end of the decade he was under attack from the proletarian musicians' association. After a stroke in 1939 he lived on, silenced, until 1944. Of his five piano trios the first and fifth are lost, and the fourth was published by Schott only in 1991, after the work of the musicologist Marina Lobanova.

The trio here is pianist Natalia Rubinstein, who also wrote the booklet notes, cellist Kirill Rodin and two violinists, Graf Mourja in the Roslavets and Nikolai Sachenko in the Shostakovich. The sessions were spread over seven years in the Large Hall of the Moscow Conservatory: the Piano Trio No. 1 in January 2017, the Piano Trio No. 2 in March 2021 and the Roslavets in March 2024, with Mikhail Spassky as producer and engineer. The Roslavets lasts more than forty minutes in four movements, from a Moderato con moto to an Allegro risoluto. Shostakovich wrote the single-movement C minor trio, Op. 8, at sixteen in 1923, first calling it Poem and dedicating it to Tatyana Glivenko; Boris Tishchenko restored the missing passages after the composer's death. The E minor trio, Op. 67, of 1944 is dedicated to the memory of Ivan Sollertinsky and opens with a slow fugato, the cello playing in harmonics. Reviewing the disc for MusicWeb International in 2026, Stephen Barber found the Roslavets idiom "chromatic, verging on expressionist" and called the trio "a real discovery".

Naxos CD 8.574691, released in February 2026, with a total playing time of about 79 minutes.