Trio Wanderer: Art Nouveau

The Strad Issue: March 2026

Description: A long-revered trio offers a compelling snapshot of a past era

Musicians: Trio Wanderer

Works: Music by Bonis, Debussy, Lalo and Ravel

Catalogue number: HARMONIA MUNDI HMM902394/95 (2 CDS)

Trio Wanderer follows its two-disc survey of music by César Franck (released in 2023) with this new one, offering a snapshot of French trio and duo music from the Art Nouveau period. The album spans the era in its entirety, from around 1880 to the start of World War I.

The inventive mix features the popular – Debussy’s sonatas for violin and for cello, as well as Ravel’s Piano Trio – alongside rarities including Debussy’s early Piano Trio, sumptuous pieces by Mel Bonis and Ravel’s still relatively neglected Sonata for violin and cello.

It’s no surprise that the distinguished Trio Wanderer, marking its 40th anniversary in 2027, produces winning performances, enhanced by a lively recorded sound. Even if the musicians can’t erase the occasional clunkiness of Lalo’s Piano Trio no.3, they set the Presto alight and inject the Trio section with joviality.

Debussy’s Piano Trio, written when he was 18 (in the same year as the Lalo), has its critics, but the first movement shows him at his lightest and breeziest, while the second reveals an already developed skill for memorable characterisation. Mel Bonis’s Soir displays some exquisite duetting between violin and cello while its companion Matin ripples with gauzy lightness.

It might be splitting hairs to suggest that violinist Jean-Marc Phillips-Varjabédian could be a whisker more capricious in the first movement of Debussy’s Violin Sonata, but the second combines agility and winning tone. Raphaël Pidoux’s account of the Cello Sonata is wistfully nostalgic in the first movement, and suitably Pierrot-ish in the second.

Ravel’s Sonata for violin and cello and Piano Trio come off as the most forcefully original, modernist pieces they are – perhaps more Art Deco than Art Nouveau – showing off the easy athleticism of these players, and a range of expression that extends from the austere to the ostentatious.

EDWARD BHESANIA