With the passing of time, Napoléon-Henri Reber (1807-80) has disappeared into the footnotes of music history, but his parents obviously had high hopes for him when, at his birth in 1807, they named him after the reigning French emperor. Trio Elégiaque have resuscitated three of Reber’s piano trios, composed respectively in 1862, 1872 and the year of his death, though the idiom might suggest that they date to about 30 or 40 years earlier. As Saint-Saëns observed of Reber’s personality, ‘He seemed like a forgotten man from the 18th century, wandering through the 19th as a contemporary of Mozart might have done, surprised and somewhat shocked by our music and our ways.’

The piano-writing in these trios, even the 1862 one (No 3), indicates that Reber was fully aware of the instrument’s supple and athletic potential, and there is a suggestion of Mendelssohn, Moscheles and Hummel as time goes on. Albeit that there are Romantic touches to the melody and at times to the general temperament of the music, it remains rooted in Classical traditions, an amalgam that Trio Elégiaque tastefully point up with their clarity of texture, warmth of lyricism and passion when the music gets heated up. Reber was acknowledged in his lifetime for his refinement and for his ‘simple and delicate spirit’, and it is these qualities that emerge from all three trios, even if none of them has the strength of character, harmonic freshness or structural originality to remain long in the memory.