Los Últimos Trios

Luigi Boccherini wrote in excess of a hundred string quintets, nearly a hundred string quartets, and sixty-odd string trios. Not to mention all his piano trios, piano quintets, flute quintets, guitar quintets and assorted sonatas; nor the dozen cello concertos & thirty symphonies. He wasn't shy about reusing and recycling sections of earlier works in later ones, but even so, he turned out a prodigious quantity of music, which makes its consistently high quality all the more impressive. The present disc includes four of his last string trios, written in Madrid in 1796.

The default string trio line-up is violin, viola and cello, but these pieces were composed for two violins and cello, played here by the group La Real Cámera comprising Emilio Moreno and Enrico Gatti (violins) plus Wouter Möller (cello). Moreno is also responsible for the booklet notes in which he characterises trios written for this instrumentation as "a difficult, arid and obsolete form ... a remnant of the old baroque trio sonata." Out of this tricky fabric, Boccherini fashioned some characteristically elegant and graceful results.

It's not my very favourite Boccherini album, but it is one I keep returning to, especially for the first two trios on it: nos. 2 and 4 of the Op. 54 set. It's a well-presented disc too: a 2005 re-issue of a 1995 recording on the Glossa label in a three-panel 'digipak' with a detail of a Goya painting on the cover, and including a 36-page booklet. The cover choice is an appropriate one, as Boccherini and Goya were contemporaries, whose paths are known to have crossed on at least a couple of occasions.

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