Trio Lakota will be holding a recital entitled Music from Russia at St James Cavalier, Valletta, next Sunday at 8 p.m. The trio features Natalia Filipenko on the violin, Yaroslav Miklukho on cello and Charlene Farrugia on piano.

The performance will focus on composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Rachmaninoff, starting off with one of Shostakovich’s most renowned pieces, Piano Trio No. 2, Op. 67.

The piece is musically remarkable for a number of elements: it was written in 1944, just after the composer finished Symphony No. 8, and both compositions share the same overall structure.

The composition also caught the imagination of music-lovers because it is a lamentation for both Shostakovich’s close friend, musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, and the victims of the Holocaust.

This is the composer’s first work to employ a ‘Jewish theme’, a musical tribute that used the scales and rhythms of Jewish folk music as Shostakovich knew it.

Shostakovich began composing the Trio in December 1943 and premiered it in November 1944 in Leningrad.

The performance will continue with Rachmaninoff’s Trio Élégiaque, a mournful elegy in memory of Tchaikovsky.

Rachmaninoff composed the Trio in 1893, the same year that Tchaikovsky died; the loss was a deep personal and professional sorrow for Rachmaninoff and he began work on this Opuson the day he learned of Tchaikovsky’s death.

Rachmaninoff applied himself with great intensity to the piece, reporting to his friend Natalia Skalon on December 17, two days after the score was finished, “While working on it, all my thoughts, feelings, powers belonged to it, ... I trembled for every phrase, sometimes crossed out everything and started over again to think, to think.”

Tickets for Music from Russia are available for €10 (adults) and €8 (concessions). For reservations e-mail boxoffice@sjcav.org or call on 2122 3200.