The performers here are new to me, but this ensemble of three Berlin musicians led by the First Concertmaster of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra is a skilful one and well suited to this music, of which in turn I must confess to unfamiliarity. The Bruch Trio in C minor (his only work in this medium) is a very agreeable piece by the artist who was perhaps the most able Kapellmeister of his generation, the name that comes to mind for informative comparison of the style is that of Mendelssohn, and this is unsurprising since the Trio dates from 1858 (ten years before the First Violin Concerto) and is the work of a 20 year old whose teacher Hiller was a close associate and admirer of that major composer. It plays for under 18 minutes, and rather unusually begins not with an Allegro but an Andante molto cantabile and it then goes on without a break to a scherzolike waltz and a flowing finale. This is perhaps a work to like rather than to wonder at, but certainly it deserves to be available and is welcome to the catalogue in this affectionate and cleanly recorded account.
In fact the Hiller Serenade is longer than the Bruch, for despite its name this is a full-scale trio the fourth of the six he wrote. The music is again continuous and wholly agreeable, though the real bonne bouche is the delightfully witty Intermezzo in alternating duple and triple metre which precedes a splendidly Italianate tarantella-finale that sounds like a tribute to Mendelssohn's Fourth Symphony but ends with a reference back to the start of the work. The Widor Four Pieces—of which the last is also a serenade—are another pleasant discovery; indeed, all three works on this CD deserve to be heard more often.'