It was an ingenious idea to couple parallel works by these two composers, all the more as Martinu, at the period when he wrote both this Trio and the Duo, was living in Paris, very much under French influences. But Martinu’s helter-skelter, easy-come-easy-go style was poles apart from that of the fastidious Ravel; and the talented Bekova sisters (from Kazakhstan) seem temperamentally more drawn to the former than to the latter. With hot-blooded energy they revel in the brittle neo-classical rough-and-tumble of No. 1 of the unrelated five short pieces which constitute Martinu’s Trio, reveal sinewy energy in the motoric No. 3, and romp through the wild No. 5 (in which the piano’s moto perpetuo opening is specially brilliant). The passages for the two stringed instruments in No. 2 are more akin to the clean-cut linearity of the Ravel duo sonata’s first movement than to his own elaborate Duo, whose high-spirited Allegro in particular calls for, and here receives, spectacular virtuosity. For sheer playing per se, this is the demonstration track of the disc.
The Ravel Sonata, though it bristles with technical difficulties, is less ear-tickling – in fact, Ravel at his starkest and least sensuous, though the sisters bring a passionate lyricism to the slow movement. They spit like wild-cats in the scherzo and make the most of the mordant Stravinskian humour of the finale. But the Ravel Trio has a fine-boned quality which eludes them. Not only is the bright-toned piano overprominent – here as throughout the trios – but the elegant first movement is soggily sentimentalized from the outset. The indication un peu plus lent is made the excuse for an indulgently slow pace which increasingly approaches stasis. Still, three impressive performances out of four is no mean achievement.'