If three major musicians are going to play together in chamber music, they need to have played together often for pleasure, and not just meet up in a recording studio, or at an international festival. The twentieth century saw two major trios: Cortot, Thibaud and Casals, and Gilels, Kogan and Rostropovich. All friends, until politics tore them apart.
I have just been listening to Tchaikovsky's Trio for piano, violin and cello Opus 50. One of my evergreen favourite works. Inevitably, the recording I listened to (superbly re-furbished by the French company Diapason) was that recorded in Moscow in 1952 by Kogan, Gilels and Rostropovich; an all-time classic, and as Russian as caviar, icy winds, and vodka. One of the few works I can only ever listen to with the same recording: no competitors after 71 years.
Leonid Kogan was, for me, the primary Russian violinist of the twentieth century. Unlike Kreisler or Heifetz, he also excelled in chamber music (the French company Doremi issued a 5-CD box of Kogan, Gilels and Rostropovich in various piano trios by Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich, Schumann, Borodin, Saint-Saëns, et al). His many recordings are classics, with the violin concertos of Paganini, Khachaturian, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms still supreme. Being now well outside the international copyright convention of 50 years, his recordings are reissued and reissued by a multitude of companies with wildly differing success results. Transfers range from unacceptable to not too bad at all. In the West, Oistrakh was preferred because many sniffed at Kogan's politics (Shostakovich always called him "Comrade Kogan"). However decades after his death, all that is left are recordings of his violin playing. One of my all-time favourite violinists and musicians.
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