Thanks for Your Support
The 2025-26 season has been truly magical, full of wonderful music—old and new—and important milestones. With this small token, we'd like to thank each and every one of our supporters for attending our concerts, donating their time and resources to support our mission, and enjoying what we do. See you in October!
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943): Trio élégiaque No. 1 in G minor
Sergei Rachmaninoff composed and premiered this trio in 1892 during his final year at the Moscow Conservatory, presenting it at his first independent concert only four days after completing the score. Though technically an early work, the trio already displays the unmistakable emotional intensity, sweeping lyricism, and dark sonorities that would come to define Rachmaninoff’s mature style. The performance was received enthusiastically, yet the work remained unpublished until 1947.
The musical elegy has long served as a means of mourning figures of great personal or artistic importance, and composers have frequently chosen the piano trio as the ideal medium for such tributes. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky honored Nikolai Rubinstein, Anton Arensky commemorated the Russian cellist and former St. Petersburg Conservatory director Karl Davydov, and Bedřich Smetana wrote a trio in memory of his eldest daughter Bedřiška, who died of scarlet fever in 1855. Rachmaninoff himself would later compose a second elegiac trio in memory of Tchaikovsky.
Although the dedicatee of this first trio remains unknown, it is widely believed that Rachmaninoff also intended it as a tribute to Tchaikovsky, whose music profoundly influenced him. The work’s principal motive—four ascending notes spanning a minor pentachord—is often interpreted as a subtle nod to one of Tchaikovsky’s most recognizable themes: the broad descending melody that opens his First Piano Concerto.