Alfred Schnittke arranged the Trio for violin, cello, and piano in 1992 from his String Trio of 1985. The arrangement carries a personal note, dedicated as it was to Schnittke's doctor, Alexander Potapov, who twice saved the composer's life from near-fatal strokes.

The original work was itself quite a personal statement. Commissioned by the Alban Berg Foundation, the Trio inhabits the sound-world of fin-de-siècle Vienna, including Alban Berg's own music, which Schnittke loved "above all others." The music also moves further back in time, to the classical Vienna of Mozart and Schubert; for Schnittke, that "certain Mozart-Schubert sound" seemed to stem from the composer's early adolescent stay in post-World War II Vienna.

This "Mozart-Schubert sound," that Schnittke has used again and again in his works with a compassionate irony, is the subject of the String Trio. In addition, the composer's arrangement for piano trio seems to intensify this allusiveness. The thick, almost choral, texture of the String Trio become lighter, more golden and refined by the piano's reserved weight and contrasting color; likewise, the new scoring allows Schnittke to rearrange the intensive motivic activity of the piece—its technical elements carry an even more "classical" attitude.

In two large movements, the entire work flows from a simple six-note cadential figure straight out of a Schubert piano sonata. The first movement makes this figure into an obsession. It starts, halts, starts again; it stammers itself out in spaces tonal and atonal, fast and slow, confessional and clamorous. New, derivative themes splinter off; old ones become crushed under the attempted recover of an illusory repose. Twice, a fantastical Valkyrie-like gallop explodes the movement's fabric, taking off into never-never land. Freud remarks that the individual constantly returns to a traumatic scene in an imaginary space, constantly replaying the trauma, trying out ever-new if ineffectual solutions. In this wandering, pathologically restless Moderato, Schnittke seems to enact such a scenario. The movement resolves through exhaustion, spinning out from the opening cadential figure a hobbled four-part minuet.

The following Adagio offers a peculiar response to the first movement's failed scenes. In reality, it offers no new material, but rather an alienated, reconfigured view of the opening, as if from afar in space and time. Things are sparser, more reflective; Russian dirge-like chorales follow late-Romantic lyricism; the strings sing out longer lines, supported by the crystalline piano writing. At the moment of utmost interiority, the wild gallop returns with a fury previously unheard. After this last cathartic seizure, Schnittke again returns to the opening cadential figure, this time in canon above an oscillating bass. The Moderato's concluding minuet also returns, but with a new clarity; it has moved in nature from wound to replica, to museum-model, and holds a new poignancy. However, the imagination, even at its limits, still houses only images, and so even this last vision sublimates into thin air.

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