Louis Spohr—immortalized by Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, gleefully devising a punishment to fit the crime of the music-hall singer, who must attend a series ''Of masses and fugues and 'ops', By Bach interwoven With Spohr and Beethoven, At classical Monday Pops'', but nowadays not considered as being quite in the same bracket as the two Bs—was nothing if not prolific. In addition to ten operas, four oratorios, 15 violin concertos and ten symphonies, he composed a huge amount of chamber music: 20 string duets, five piano trios, 35 string quartets, five quintets, a sextet, octet and nonet, and four double quartets. He came to the piano trio fairly late in life, in 1841, when he was 57, but he wrote four within two years, following these up with a fifth in 1849.
It seems extraordinary that these remarkable and technically very demanding works, which are conceived on a large scale, use the three instruments in a highly imaginative way (with the bass of the harmony often being given to the cello rather than the piano, for example) and contain many instances of thematic relationships between movements, have been dropped completely from the concert repertory. Writing in The Musical Examiner in 1842, the critic J. W. Davison advised amateur musicians to address themselves to the E minor Trio with ''an artist-like feeling of enthusiasm. Thus approached and thus rendered'', he went on, ''we cannot hesitate to say, that the result will be fully up to their expectations, will wholly satisfy their most zealous imaginings. In any case, were this trio less of a masterpiece than it assuredly is, being the first effort of its kind from the pen of a composer so great as Spohr, it is indisputably an object of very general interest among all true worshippers of music, professional or amateur, one and all of whom, if our admonition be accepted will not lose a moment in obtaining it.'' He was absolutely right. Both trios recorded here are full of good things, notably the scherzo of No. 1, of which, as Michael Freyhan writes in his accompanying note ''one might have stumbled into a Dvorak Slavonic Dance, except that the year in which this work was written was the year in which Dvorak was born'', and the Larghetto of No. 2, with its remarkable sonorities, the cello often more than two octaves below the piano and the violin often supplying the middle, not the top line.
The performances are committed and compelling, with musicianship perhaps being more in evidence than virtuosity, and they should do much to reawaken an interest in these and in Spohr's three other trios. The ensemble takes its name from the fact that the piano used is a Broadwood grand of 1823, similar to the six-octave instrument that Broadwood sent to Beethoven in 1817 (which is now in the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest), and the balance between it and the other two instruments is very nicely judged in the recording, made last summer in the church of St John-at-Hackney in London.'