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The debut release from the heralded Merz Trio has a unique concept. It presents Ravel's Piano Trio in A minor of 1914, with its four movements split up and surrounded by other "voices that were in the air and on the streets" in that year, to use the performers' words. These voices are both musical and textual, and more broadly, the album, the trio members say, "is about music and words sharing their dark, untidy medium, spilling onto the page as notes and letters and spoken into the world by voices and instruments." . . . but the playing of this young trio, both precise and evocative, promises much for the future, as does their originality of mind.