Charles Ives — Largo (for violin, clarinet, and piano)

Charles Ives wrote this brief, lyrical movement around 1901–02, reworking material from an early violin sonata he’d begun as a student. It speaks in a late-Romantic voice closer to Brahms or Dvořák than to the dissonant, tune-quoting Ives of his later fame: a single unbroken arc that opens and closes quietly, the violin spinning out a wide-ranging melody over a gentle piano ostinato before the clarinet enters and the music swells to real expressive warmth. It went unpublished until 1953, the year before the composer’s death.

Igor Stravinsky — L’Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale)

Written in Switzerland in 1918, when wartime shortages ruled out anything like a full orchestra, Stravinsky’s theater piece was scored for narrator, dancers, and just seven instruments. With writer C. F. Ramuz, he adapted a Russian folk tale about a soldier who trades his violin — and with it his soul — to the Devil for a book that predicts the future, growing rich but losing all capacity for joy. The score is a sly cabinet of borrowed popular dances — tango, waltz, ragtime, march — refracted through Stravinsky’s new, spiky neoclassical rhythm.

Paul Schoenfield — Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano

Paul Schoenfield composed this high-spirited trio in 1990. Its four movements — Freylakh, March, Nigun, and Kozatske — each draw on a different Eastern European Jewish dance or song form, swinging between exuberant virtuosity and passages of plaintive, improvisatory lyricism.