This record couples Shostakovich's two most important wartime chamber works and since both are for piano and strings, they make a sensible and logical coupling. The Piano Quintet is perhaps the more frequently recorded though at present there are five versions of each in the current catalogue, including the 1952 pioneering account in the West of the Quintet by the Quintetto Chigiano (Decca ECS592, 5/71). The composer's own with the Beethoven Quartet, who gave its first performance, was included in the mono HMV ''Shostakovich Plays Shostakovich'' boxed set some years ago (RLS721, 10/76) but is no longer in circulation. Shostakovich's own version of the Trio, Op. 67 with David Oistrakh and Milo¦ Sadlo which favours very brisk and unelegiac tempos at times, is still listed (Supraphon 010 2371-2, 8/79).
These performances can hold their own with most that have appeared in recent years and are certainly to be preferred to the rival RCA coupling listed above. Roger Woodward's commitment to Shostakovich is not in question but the quartet is by no means so accomplished or well-blended tonally as the artists recorded here. They give a well-shaped and sensitive account of the Quintet, although the Borodin Quartet and Lyubov Yedlina (HMV ASD3072, 5/75—nla) brought greater panache to it, and give an unaffected and thoughtful reading of the Trio. This is a particularly painful and anguished work dedicated to the memory of a close friend, the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, who perished in a Nazi death camp in 1944, the year of its composition. The cruel cello harmonics of the very opening convey its desolation of spirit and Eileen Croxford rises to the challenge, though in comparison, perhaps, with Yong Uck Kim in the now-deleted version with Kirschbaum and Previn (HMV HQS1330, 9/74) Hugh Bean sounds a shade reticent. I suppose that both this and the 1969 record of Pavel Serebryakov, Mikhail Vaiman and Rostropovich (HMV ASD2718, 8/71—nla) have a higher voltage in the faster movements and greater intensity in the Passacaglia. Taken on its own merits, however, here is a thoroughly satisfying account and it is very well recorded. In the Quintet, the balance is truthful as indeed it is in the Trio even though the piano looms slightly larger there. Recommended.'