Not the most familiar pair of composers; but they have one point in common (in addition to their century): a taste for the sound of oboe and horn in partnership with the piano. Indeed, it is a well-founded taste: not unlike the standard piano trio in balance of the different registers, it improves on that in variety of tone-colour. It demands, of course, that the two wind players should be soloists of great sensitivity: on this occasion they are—Goritzki and Tuckwell, both players of warm tone, poetical phrasing, and great stamina—for present purposes, where neither composer seems much interested in writing for anything less than all three instruments at once, stamina is distinctly of the essence!
If Herzogenberg seems, nevertheless, to secure more varied sounds from the trio than Reinecke, this is principally on account of the basically more varied music he writes. As Baron von Herzogenberg-Peccaduc he was an Austrian nobleman, born in Graz in 1843, and working largely there until he went to Leipzig (where he came into English history by teaching Ethel Smyth). Something of Austrian Gemutlichkeit survived in his music; during his first movement it is easy to visualize the green, rolling countryside of southern Austria (dare I say that Julie Andrews might come to mind?); in his second movement the horn's origin as an encourager of hounds might equally reasonably strike a listener. Indeed, these moods are seldom far off: a cynic might suggest that if only this trio had been called the 'Pastoral' it would today be well known and well enjoyed!
It would, though, take more than a nickname to do that, I think, for the trio by Reinecke, born not in Austria but in Altona. Today Altona, in Germany, is virtually an extension of Hamburg (in fact it lies conveniently closer to St Pauli than does the larger city); but at Reinecke's birth (in 1824) Altona was in Denmark, part of the 'Schleswig-Holstein question' that bemused European politicians for some generations. Reinecke divided his time between Denmark proper and Germany proper; like Herzogenberg he eventually gravitated to Leipzig. His music is very, very German: situated somewhere in the depression lying between Schumann and Brahms, it consists almost entirely of rather neutral tunes on the oboe or the horn or on both, accompanied by triplet figuration on the piano. It makes little difference which movement you select to try (the fourth, though, has a shot at getting going); the whole shares with Parsifal the advantage of allowing a listener who drops off to sleep to miss nothing, for when he wakes whatever was previously going on is still doing so.
None of this prevents the players from giving the pedestrian work a splendid, close-to-redeeming performance; and both trios are well recorded, in a very good balance. Have a go, if you are of a mind: you have nothing to lose but your patience!'