Most us might think of Gabriel Fauré as a 19th century composer, but he lived through the first quarter of the 20th century. He remained a Romantic, however; and though his piano trio was written nine years after that of Maurice Ravel, it is the one that sounds the older of the two. Dark, with rich sonorities and a beautiful lyric second movement, Fauré’s piece falls easily on the ears. Ravel’s voluptuous composition does too, but is definitely more forward thinking in its use of harmony and rhythms. The Debussy is a student work that strikes me as an unusually competent piece of salon music, full of charm, but never profound or even hinting at any sort of greatness to come. The Florestan Trio plays each work in the proper style and with singular unanimity and uncanny balance. This musical threesome really thinks as one. Once a few intonation burrs are smoothed out, it will be a trio to rival the Beaux Arts, or better, carry on its tradition.
This CD is one of the first of the Philips hybrid Super-Audio CD dual layer discs. If you play it on a conventional CD player, you will get excellent sound. But when, according to the printed info, you play it on one of the soon-to-be-released players that will handle Super-Audio CD, you will hear the other layer, which contains a much higher sampling rate, and presumably more detailed sound. Currently, readers might be most interested to know if the hybrid plays successfully on regular players. I tried it on three and it played just like a normal CD, with no problems at all. The CD sound is so good on this one, with such presence and transparency, that an improvement would be like having the trio in your listening room live. This approach makes sense to me: you can hear it now, yet when improvements are made the software is prepared to take advantage of them.
