Mussorgsky's Pictures has not lacked orchestrators (I think there are now some 20 versions, but I await correction) ; this piano trio arrangement seems to be a first. It often works surprisingly well. 'Gnomus' is spookily laid out with plenty of string tremolo and sul ponticello; there is what sounds like some eerie col legno bowing in 'The Old Castle'; and 'Tuileries' speeds along with lightly dancing string figuration around the piano. Here, though, I felt the Bekovas missed a trick by not giving the final rush up from the bass, ending on a high note, to cello handing over to violin. However, there have been enough hands laid on the work without reviewers adding theirs. One of the most touching pieces is the double portrait of the two Jews, one rich, one poor (they were separate pictures in the exhibition, and the painter gave them to Mussorgsky). I have always disliked the snivelling muted trumpet in Ravel's orchestration. Here, much of the music is given to the violin, tenderly played.
Rimsky-Korsakov's Trio is a very different matter. In My Musical Life (Faber: 1989), he dismisses it, together with his G major String Quartet, as proving that chamber music was not his field. He abandoned it unfinished, and it was completed years later by his son-in-law Maximilian Steinberg. Yet only in the lengthy finale does he seem to lose his way in musical manipulation; the equally long opening Allegro sustains its reflective mood well, and there is a graceful Allegro and an Adagio of much elegiac eloquence. It is an attractive and interesting piece, and the Bekova Sisters respond with especial sensitivity to the beautiful instrumental writing which had, of course, long been Rimsky-Korsakov's second nature.
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