Sergei Rachmaninov wrote two piano trios, both of them essentially elegiac in character. The first was a doleful single-movement work in G minor written in four days in 1892. While it has the gloomy charm of youthful morbidity, its gloom seems facile and superficial compared to the profound emotions of the Trio in D minor that followed only a year later. Inspired by the shocking death of Tchaikovsky on October 23, 1893, Rachmaninov responded by beginning a work in his memory two days later. Laboring over it for six weeks, Rachmaninov composed a work in three huge and hugely despairing movements. Taking Tchaikovsky's own elegiac piano trio as a model, Rachmaninov's work consists of a large-scale sonata movement, an enormous central set of variations, and a resolutely defiant concluding fast movement. And like Tchaikovsky's Trio, Rachmaninov's features virtuoso writing for the piano, including a cadenza after the passionate climax of the opening movement. But despite its origins in the music of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov's Trio is wholly his own: the furiously mournful melodies, the fuliginously smoky textures, the weighty but virtuosic piano writing; all of these things are characteristic of no one but Rachmaninov.

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