Originally scored for baritone, cello and piano, "The Seed of Dream" set several poems of the Vilna Ghetto survivor Avraham Sutzkever (b. 1913). Four of the five poems were translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams, while "Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars" was translated by Leonard Wolf. Sutzkever consistently produced poems of great artistry under the most dire of circumstances. These first-person accounts, written between 1941 and 1944, not only bear witness to the destruction around him, but to his undying belief in the beauty of the word and the world. -Lori Laitman

The introduction of the Shostakovich piece is one of the most striking passages in the trio repertory. The cello begins alone with a keening flutelike melody. The violin slips in at midrange; the piano follows with rumbling bass notes. The security with which these instruments must negotiate this spectral music sets the tone for a collaboration of striking sympathy and balance, maintained through a slashing Allegro con brio, a funereal Largo and a sardonic Allegretto-Adagio. -New York Times

Seeking musical images commensurate with the fathomless terror of the Holocaust, composers from Schoenberg to Penderecki have unleashed masses of orchestral dissonance. But the most powerful musical statements on this largest of themes have taken a more modest and oblique form: the ghostly dance finale of Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2. -Alex Ross, New York Times
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