Continuing AVIE’s acclaimed and influential series of recordings of the music of Austrian émigré Hans Gál, this latest release brings together two of today’s most eminent Gál interpreters, Sarah Beth Briggs and Kenneth Woods with violin virtuoso David Juritz for a recording of Gál’s breathtakingly lyrical Piano Trio in E major and his witty Variations on a Popular Viennese Tune. Gál’s music and destiny was shaped by war and political upheaval, as was that of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Piano Trio in E minor, one of the monuments of 20th century chamber music, is a harrowing souvenir of the times in which it was written.