The jewel-box cover draws attention to the fact that these two piano trios are close contemporaries. Korngold's was written in 1910, when the composer was a precociously knowing 12-year-old: Ives completed his in 1911, as a relative greybeard of 37. Yet what is really striking about hearing the two works together is that it is Ives's piece which has the unpredictability and wide-eared 'innocence' we might expect from a child-composer, while Korngold's reveals what might pass for the complacent acceptance of convention.
Ives's Trio is one of that disconcerting master's most memorable works, its expressiveness as consistently involving as its style is wayward and diverse. Beginning with an eloquence that seems content to shadow contemporary European models, it proceeds to cultivate that heterogeneous mode of allusion and contradiction for which Ives is best known: hymn tunes and dance tunes play musical chairs, a game that is most exuberant in the scherzo, but which reaches heights of lyric ambivalence in a finale where European reminiscence—a turning phrase redolent of Wagner and Mahler—dissolves into a nostalgic, abbreviated meditation on the hymn tune Rock of Ages; nothing in Ives is less stable than a musical metaphor for the ultimate security of religious faith. The Pacific Art Trio tackle the piece with abundant variety of expression, probably sounding more over-excited than they actually were in a gutsy and hard-edged recording, the limitations of its analogue provenance clearly exposed.
As for Korngold's Op. 1: it is an astonishing achievement, yet I found it dispiriting, simply because it is only in those places where the mask of instinctive fluency cracks—certain capricious features in the slow movement, the nicely rude ending of the finale—that the glimmer of a distinctive musical personality appears. The features are far more endearing than the unimaginative textures of the scherzo and the fact that the finale peaks too soon. The young Korngold had nothing and everything to learn, and no doubt your attitude to this piece will depend to a great extent on how you feel about his later music. (I might add that you will get a very different view of the piece from Harold Truscott's passionately partisan notes.) This is another robust performance by the Pacific Art Trio, in which the strings occasionally struggle to be heard, and the violin tone grows wiry under pressure.'