In 1897, Rimsky-Korsakov composed the rough draft for a piano trio in C minor. He polished the middle movements to performance level, but it was left to the composer’s son-in-law, Maximilian Steinberg, to reconstruct its outer movements some 30 years after the composer’s death. While Rimsky disparaged the work in his autobiography, its wistful lyricism and operatic scope hold your attention beyond the sometimes stilted interplay between instruments. The Bekova Sisters turn in idiomatic, sensitively dovetailed work, although violinist Elvira’s oily vibrato seems excessively sweet in soft, sustained passages.
Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition has been arranged for umpteen instrumental combinations of all shapes and sizes, but never, to my knowledge, for piano trio until the Bekova Sisters’ collective effort, recorded here for the first time. In essence, it’s Mussorsgky’s solo piano original mostly played intact, with many token interjections from the strings to reinforce accents and point up phrases. The instruments are deployed in a cut and dried manner that hardly taps into the music’s potential for textural interplay. Like Ravel, the Bekovas omit the reprise of the Promenade before the Market Place in Limoges. There are, to be sure, effective touches, like the violin’s spiccato rendition of the quarrelsome repeated notes in Samuel Goldberg and Schmuyle, or the eloquence of the cello declaming Byldo’s gloomy ox-cart melody. A harder-edged attitude toward dynamics would have been welcome, along with a more assertive, daring arranger.
