Reviewing the BIS disc listed above, which included Schnittke's String Trio, DJF declared: ''there will surely be a finer recording of this before too long''. I wouldn't wish to deny all virtue to the BIS players: if they tend to the laborious, the long-drawn-out, the ASV team might be accused of rather too smooth an approach. Overall, nevertheless, this new performance is extremely satisfying. It is atmospherically recorded, and convincingly reinforces the Trio's claims to be considered one of Schnittke's major works. The music is surely to be preferred in this original version, rather than as the 'Trio Sonata' of Yuri Bashmet's orchestral arrangement (RCA, 2/92).
Dating from 1985, and written in response to a commission from the Alban Berg Society of Vienna, the Trio is notable for the extent to which its reminiscences and re-creations are far less contrived and self-indulgent than is often the case with this composer. They are not merely backward-looking, nostalgic gestures, but suggest a blueprint for a new, romantically tinged post-modernism. Whether or not you go along with this analysis, it is difficult to deny that the Trio puts the pair of early violin sonatas into the shade. They are not negligible pieces, even so, and these performances have much to commend them. True, Mark Lubotsky's versions on Ondine have particular authority—he is the dedicatee of both sonatas—and Lubotsky is an arrestingly muscular player, but the dry, close sound on the Ondine disc is inferior to the more spacious, better balanced ASV. Mateja Marinkovic and Linn Hendry makea first-rate duo: even the most turbulent, piano-bashing bits of the Second Sonata are not deprived of all musical sense, and the urgentinterplay between the instruments has anauthentic intensity.'