The Feininger Trio, members of the Berliner Philharmoniker, present the first in a new series of albums pairing each of the three piano trios written by Brahms with a work by another Viennese composer: Alexander Zemlinsky, Ernst Krenek, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, respectively. Brahms’s piano trios are among the genre’s crowning achievements, and the Feininger Trio were interested in exploring how the piano trio genre developed in the master’s wake. As Alexander Zemlinsky put it, young composers attempted to outdo one another by writing in a vein as Brahmsian as possible. Young Zemlinsky knew Brahms and enjoyed the older composer’s support. He was not Brahms’s pupil, but his early Piano Trio, Op. 3 has much in common with Brahms. © CAvi-Music