A debut recording, four distinctive compositional voices and Pizzicato’s highest rating of 5/5: the Candor Piano Trio’s first album for Da Vinci Classics invites us to reconsider the richness of a repertoire too often left at the margins.

What makes a neglected work worth hearing again? Rarity can draw our attention, but it cannot sustain it on its own. That requires musical substance and performers capable of making its language feel necessary. Garden After Midnight: Piano Trios brings these two conditions together in a programme devoted to Enrique Granados, Ludomir Różycki, Ruperto Chapí and Philipp Scharwenka.

Reviewing the album for Pizzicato on 16 October 2026, Remy Franck awarded the recording the publication’s top rating. His account places the quality of the performances alongside the interest of the repertoire, praising the Candor Piano Trio’s energy, virtuosity and expressive engagement. Of the Granados, he writes of “great charm and vitality, rich in contrast”. It is an apt starting point for exploring a debut whose significance extends beyond the recovery of unfamiliar titles.

Three musicians, a shared musical imagination

Founded in 2023, the Candor Piano Trio brings together Spanish pianist Julia Maria Figueres Heinz, Polish violinist Weronika Bagniewska and Polish cellist Ignacy Krzemiński-Iwan. Their Spanish and Polish backgrounds find a natural point of contact in this programme, while their work together at Madrid’s Centro Superior Katarina Gurska has given that encounter a shared artistic direction.

The piano trio demands a particular kind of equality. The piano can suggest an orchestral breadth that threatens to overwhelm the strings; the violin and cello can draw the musical argument towards the intimacy of the human voice. A persuasive interpretation must allow both possibilities to coexist. Balance is therefore an expressive responsibility as much as an acoustic one: who leads a phrase, who answers it, and how a change of colour alters its meaning.

Franck’s review recognises precisely the combination this repertoire needs, with vitality serving character and contrast. For a young ensemble making its recording debut, such a programme is an artistic statement. It asks listeners to encounter four composers through the sustained interaction of three musical personalities.

Granados: the lyricism of conversation

Enrique Granados is most readily associated with the piano, especially the imaginative world of Goyescas. His Piano Trio in C major, Op. 50 offers another perspective on that lyrical sensibility. Across four movements, the keyboard becomes a participant in a conversation whose expressive centre continually shifts between instruments.

The opening Poco allegro con espressione establishes a language in which melodic warmth and harmonic shading are closely connected. The Scherzetto introduces a lighter, more agile manner; then the Duetto draws the music towards the closeness suggested by its title. Here, the relationship between the string voices and the piano’s resonance becomes particularly revealing. The finale restores outward movement and energy, completing an arc that depends on the distinct character of each movement.

It would be limiting to approach this music only in search of recognisably Spanish gestures. Granados’s chamber writing also belongs to a wider European culture of lyricism, formal dialogue and Romantic intimacy. The trio allows us to hear how individual that voice remains when it speaks through an ensemble.

Różycki: rhapsody with an inner architecture

Ludomir Różycki’s Rhapsody in D minor, Op. 33 changes the scale of the conversation. Its single-movement design makes room for contrasting episodes, shifts of atmosphere and an almost orchestral conception of instrumental colour. Yet rhapsodic freedom need not imply the absence of structure. The relationship between contrasting ideas gives the work its continuity and dramatic purpose.

Associated with the musical culture of Young Poland, Różycki brings a theatrical imagination to chamber music. Lyrical expansiveness and rhythmic impulse become complementary forces. The challenge for the players is to let each episode acquire its own character while preserving the sense of a larger trajectory. A trio’s capacity to think together becomes especially important when the boundaries between reflection, transition and climax are so fluid.

Chapí: dramatic instinct in chamber form

Ruperto Chapí’s reputation rests above all on his contribution to zarzuela. His Piano Trio in D major offers a compelling reminder that a composer’s best-known field does not define the limits of his imagination. The work’s two movements, Allegro con fuoco and Scherzo. Presto, concentrate their argument in fast tempi and sharply characterised gestures.

The move from D major to the scherzo’s D minor gives this compact design a distinctive expressive turn. Instead of a conventional progression towards a broadly affirmative finale, the listener encounters a darker, restless close. The energy associated with the theatre is channelled into instrumental exchange, rhythmic definition and the management of momentum. Its immediacy depends on the precision with which the ensemble shapes that movement.

This is also where the distinction between virtuosity and display matters. Speed and brilliance become musically persuasive when they clarify the direction of a phrase and the tension between voices. Pizzicato’s praise for the Candor Piano Trio’s performance of Chapí places its virtuosity within that expressive context.

Philipp Scharwenka: contemplation before motion

Philipp Scharwenka’s Piano Trio in C-sharp minor, Op. 100 concludes the album with a different formal proposition. Its opening Lento tranquillo is a complete first movement, giving sustained reflection the structural weight often reserved for a faster opening. The two subsequent movements, Allegro and Allegro appassionato, change the music’s centre of gravity towards motion and intensity.

The order matters. The listener first inhabits a world of lyrical concentration and shaded expression; the later energy is heard in relation to that experience. Scharwenka’s Romantic inheritance becomes the basis for a musical argument in which melodic richness and chamber dialogue carry equal importance. Each instrument must retain its identity within a closely interwoven texture.

A debut that opens the repertoire

Read together, these four works reveal how many different forms the piano trio could take within a shared Romantic inheritance. Granados’s four-movement conversation, Różycki’s rhapsodic continuity, Chapí’s compressed dramatic energy and Scharwenka’s contemplative opening propose different relationships between lyricism, structure and instrumental colour.

The value of a recording such as Garden After Midnight lies in making those differences audible and inviting further listening. A strong interpretation gives an unfamiliar work a place in the listener’s musical memory. Pizzicato’s highest rating recognises a debut in which curiosity about repertoire and the quality of ensemble playing reinforce one another. For the Candor Piano Trio, it is a particularly rewarding beginning with Da Vinci Classics.

Garden After Midnight: Piano Trios
Candor Piano Trio
Da Vinci Classics, C01236
Released 16 October 2026.

Recorded in February 2026 at Sala Musicale Giardino, Crema, Italy. Sound engineer: Gabriele Zanetti, DV Studios.

This article draws on Giuliano Marco Mattioli’s album notes, alongside Remy Franck’s review for Pizzicato.