Ravel finished his only piano trio in a fever in the summer of 1914, racing to enlist as war broke out. The opening movement grows from a lilting theme in the rhythm of the zortziko, the limping 5/8 dance of his Basque homeland, into music of extraordinary shimmer and reach, the three instruments spaced so widely the trio seems to become an orchestra.
Composed when Moeran was fresh from the Royal College of Music and the trenches of the Great War, his early Piano Trio opens with an Allegro of windswept lyricism, English pastoral warmth already shading into the Irish accent that would claim him. Hearing it beside the Ravel, written just six years earlier, makes a fascinating study in two composers finding song after catastrophe.
