In his youth, Rachmaninov wrote two piano trios one year apart, calling each Trio élégiaque. The second and far longer was written in memory of Tchaikovsky, begun the day he died and completed six weeks later. The first trio, though, is a concise, one-movement work not apparently meant to memorialize anyone in particular.

The G minor movement, marked Lento lugubre, begins with throbbing, almost electronic-sounding figures in the strings. Soon the piano comes in with the main theme, which is both deeply melancholy and deeply Slavic; it could have been lifted from Tchaikovsky's own trio of a year earlier. The strings take up the melody in separate, imitative lines over a flowing piano accompaniment, then recede as the piano plays a mysterious, hesitant figure that looks ahead to Rachmaninov's mature work, but before anything comes of this, the violin brings on a new, full, ardent theme back in the Tchaikovsky mode. Rachmaninov glides into a development of this material, splitting the melodies into often anguished fragments and repeating them at length, in the manner of Tchaikovsky (one accompanimental cello figure, in fact, comes directly from Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony). The recapitulation picks up at the point in the exposition where the strings took the melody, proceeds through a restatement of all the initial material, and ends with a funereal coda.

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