Piano Trio No. 2 (Shostakovich)

67, is a piece for violin, cello and piano by the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, started in late 1943 and completed in August the following year.

Erik Levi wrote: Shostakovich's Trio ... confront[s] the horrors perpetrated by the retreating German army during the last years of the war.

In particular, Shostakovich was deeply affected by the stories featured in the Soviet press that SS guards at the death camps of Treblinka and Majdaenk had forced Jewish prisoners to dig their own graves and dance upon them.

[7][a] Upon hearing of his friend's death he wrote to Sollertinsky's widow that "it is impossible to express in words all the grief that engulfed me on hearing the news about [Sollertinsky's] death", and that "to live without him will be unbearably difficult";[3][10] in the following months he suffered from periods of depression and struggled to compose, at one point writing "it seems to me that I will never be able to compose another note again".

The next year, on 26 May 1947, he made a second recording with David Oistrakh and the Czech cellist Miloš Sádlo at the Prague Festival.

[19][clarification needed] Sollertinsky's sister considered the movement to be "an amazingly exact portrait" of her brother, whom she said Shostakovich "understood like no one else".

[25] The third movement, in B-flat minor, is a passacaglia, based around a repeating eight-bar theme of sustained semibreve chords in the piano, tonally unstable in character.

[22] In 1975, after Shostakovich's death, this movement was played at his public funeral service held in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.