Shostakovich wrote his First Piano Trio in the summer of 1923 while he was vacationing in the Crimean peninsula. Actually, "vacationing" may be too strong a word: the 17-year-old composer was sickly and anemic and had been sent to the Crimea along with his sister in order to recover his health and regain his strength. In any event, he did more than that. As his sister wrote home to their mother in Petersburg, "(he) has grown, got a suntan, is cheerful and has fallen in love." Indeed he had: the object of his affections was the vivacious and flirtatious Tatyana Glivenko, a girl two weeks his junior and the love of Shostakovich's life for nearly the next decade (only her marriage and birth of a child ultimately closed that chapter in Shostakovich's sentimental education).

But, the first fruit of that love was the Piano Trio, an ardent work in one quarter-hour movement which Shostakovich originally entitled "Poem." With all the work's themes derived from the opening chromatically longing motive, Shostakovich's work is a hymn to love both sacred and sensual. There is very little in the work's themes or developments which prefigure the young composer's incipient modernism and much that recalls the Romanticism which he was shortly to repudiate. But, Shostakovich was young and in love and the trio is arguably the most romantic and Romantic work he ever composed.

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