"Lignes de fuite" (Lines of Escape)

Within the span of a single decade, three piano trios emerged that would each, in their own way, reimagine the very soul of French music.

Maurice Ravel’s Trio en la mineur (1914) glows with iridescent colors and rhythmic vitality — music conceived in the final days before he left for the trenches of World War I, its elegance shot through with quiet urgency.

Just a few years later, in 1917, Germaine Tailleferre — the luminous and sharp-witted lone woman of Les Six — began her own trio, a work left unfinished for more than half a century. When she returned to it in 1978, she braided together the clarity of her youth with the knowing grace of experience.

And in 1923, Gabriel Fauré, nearing the end of his life, composed his penultimate work: a trio of distilled refinement, where every phrase seems polished by decades of artistry into something crystalline and eternal.