Trio Isimsiz - Press

Korngold Piano Trio Op 1
Francisco Coll Piano Trio (world première recording)
Brahms Piano Trio No 2 Op 87
Trio Isimsiz

Rubicon Classics RCD1107

… a fine performance [Brahms Piano Trio] that can stand with all the others on the market, but there is much more here… Perhaps the highlight is the Piano Trio of Francisco Coll … unmistakably modern but completely accessible, with terse elaborations spinning off edgy single notes or unisons … It is a fascinating work rhythmically. Add in excellent sound and one has as an outstanding chamber release.

James Manheim, AllMusic Review, February 2024

No one who follows Trio Isimsiz should hesitate to add this volume to their collections. While there are many options for the Brahms, this disc enlightens in its unusual programme, including the premiere of a substantial new piano trio.

Leslie Wright, Music Web International, 13 February 2024

Coll’s Piano Trio takes us to another world, teeming with rhythmic detail that the players duly translate into suppleness, and with seismic dynamic shifts that are absorbed as natural expression. It’s a vivid testament to the group’s considerable individual skills and collective power. The recording gloriously reflects these gifts.

Edward Bhesania, The Strad, February 2024

Few works in his [Francisco Coll’s] catalogue to date present a structure as manifestly solid, coherent and balanced as this one, and yet the typically ambiguous and asymmetrical nature of its constituent elements, intensely accentuated by the austerity and transparency of the music, continues to give. There is room, both in the most active extreme movements and in the most slow and reflective interior passages, for the emergence of all types of unsuspected relationships and behaviours that are extremely suggestive.

If at its premiere in Madrid, two years ago, Trio Isimsiz already showed that it possessed more than the technical control, analytical capacity and sensitivity necessary to solve music of these characteristics, it is now, in the studio, when it has truly managed to project, in an effective and uninhibited way, the expressive three-dimensionality contained in it. It is not easy to find such capable and seriously committed musicians, but Coll is here, once again, in very good hands.

Jesús Castañer, Scherzo.es, 23 January 2024

Fabulously finessed: Trio Isimsiz are on fire in Brahms and Korngold.
This impressive recording comes from an ensemble that is reaching its maturity in a superb way. … There’s an excellent finesse to the group’s playing which holds their individual contributions and their collective, conversational ensemble work in an ideal balance… this is a delectable cake on which excellent recorded sound is the crisp, bright icing.

Jessica Duchen, BBC Music Magazine, February 2024

They have a lovely feeling for the urgent romanticism of the young Erich Korngold … Trio Isimsiz, find a lovely balance of lightness and glowing passion in this new recording. I like the balance of the programme as well – precocious Korngold first, mature Brahms last – the rich warmth of his second piano trio – and, in between them. a piece written for them by Francisco Coll – fresh and exciting, like fragments of piano trio history seen as shattered shards of a mirror.

Andrew MacGregor, BBC Radio 3 Record Review, 9 December 2023

Francisco Coll Piano Trio
World première
Madrid 24 January 2022

Coll’s piece is made up of four movements; extraordinary the first, curiously based on Strauss’s opera The Silent Woman; a second based on flamenco motifs …. [which are] very well resolved technically; and two last movements full of verve and magnificent details supported by dynamic contrasts. In short, an excellent work, that I see more as four small, almost independent, works.

Jorge Fernández Guerra, El Pais, 25 January 2022

Composed in 2019, [Coll’s Piano Trio] gives the impression that, throughout those four movements mentioned above, there is a stylization of elements, if not ancient, then at least earlier. Almost historical … whose values and intensity are very suggestive. To understand them in a single reading would seem too daring on our part. But a second hearing would certainly be very worthwhile, since it is loaded with ideas that make it especially interesting.

Santiago Martin Bermudez, Sherzo, 25 January 2022

Trio Isimsiz: Fauré, Schubert & Brahms on Rubicon Classicvs

Fauré, Schubert and Brahms on Rubicon

I felt that the restrained approach of the trio should work very well in the Fauré, and it certainly did. This is one of the best versions I have heard – elegant, atmospheric and very French – and if you love this work, his last, you certainly owe it to yourself to give this a listen.

David Barker, Music Web International, December 2020

The opening to Schubert’s Nocturne… is whisperingly exquisite, a remarkable synthesis between the strings, tender, beautifully shaped, before the more abrasively intense middle section… Brahms’ Piano Trio No 1… is all played with tender and impassioned commitment here.

***** Sarah Urwin-Jones, BBC Music Magazine, Christmas 2020

With Trio Isimsiz’s impressive 2017 debut recording still lodged pleasantly in the memory, this second album – made possible through a Borletti-Buitoni Trust fellowship – is a welcome sight. What’s more, it fully meets the high bar set by its predecessor, seamlessly picking up the latter’s threads of softly measured romance and taut poise … the 1889 revised version of Brahms’ Trio No 1 in B major is presented in a reading serving as a worthy successor to the debut album’s superb Trio No 3, pulling us in from the get-go to Brahms’ intense world of passionate emotion tempered by poised Classicism, confidence and joy tempered by fragility and doubt. It’s a reading to lose yourself in, whether in the ardent sweetness and power of their forte singing, or in the myriad different qualities of silence that they serve. We can only hope that a third album eventually arrives with Brahms No 2.

Charlotte Gardner, The Strad, December 2020