If you mix every color of paint together, you end up with black. Similarly, the darkness in the music of Lera Auerbach (b. 1973) consists of every imaginable shade of color, from pitch darkness to dazzling light. The composer thus captures the mercuriality of life and the human psyche. Her music sometimes also depicts a dance with the inescapable: the struggle against Fate, the inexorable passing of time, an unattainable dream - but always with black humour and a dark though starlit sky.

‘Many composers create something “beautiful,” outside human reality,’ according to the Delta Piano Trio, who worked hard with Auberbach in preparing for this album. ‘Instead, Lera's music is raw as well as human. She never eases up on what she wants to express, which would rob the music of all its fervor.’

It was Auerbach's own idea to call this album Milking Darkness. The Delta Piano Trio feels that it is a fitting description not only of her work as a whole but also of the intense effect her music can have.

Quite often, a work becomes a journey of discovery toward a certain origin, translated into sound. Martin, Mansurian and Dvořák composed three such colorful works for piano trio - voyages of discovery taken here by the Delta Piano Trio through scintillating sound worlds.

When an Irish-American benefactor asked him to write a work based on Irish folk songs, Martin grasped this as an exquisite opportunity to combine two of the quests occupying him at the time - music from distant cultures and rhythm. his Trio sur des mélodies populaires irlandaises (1925) is a complex, mature and multi-layered score.

The Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian (b. 1939) gives the term a deeper meaning with the idea behind his 5 Bagatelles (1985): the smallest things can have the greatest significance in life. Each bagatelle sounds like a moment when truth opens up; crystal clear while at the same time beyond our comprehension.

Like many artists of the Romantic era, Czech composer Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) let his music flourish from his deepest roots, his origins. His unique style represents a melting-pot of all sorts of characteristic elements of music and dance from his beloved Bohemia with the classical idiom. An example is the famous Piano Trio no. 4 (1891), based on the ‘dumky,’ epic folk ballads depicting a tragic historical event. In much the same way that Martin, Mansurian and Dvořák each made their own voyages of discovery in their compositions, the Delta Piano Trio has also reached the heart of these three works.

The Delta Piano Trio enjoys a special relationship with composer Lera Auerbach. While searching for contemporary repertoire the group fell in love with Auerbach's piano trios, performing them regularly and, after writing to her about them, enjoying the opportunity to work on this music together with the composer. This experience has given these musicians a unique insight into Auerbach's piano trios. The title of this CD was inspired by Auerbach's second piano trio, Tryptych - Tryptych. The Mirror with Three Faces (2012). The work, which is at the heart of this disc, follows the physical construction of a hinged mirror, and Auerbach speaks of it in terms of a theater piece in which three individuals have their own separate stories but are part of a single entity. Yet there is an ambiguity about the reflection in the mirror -is it three facets of the same person, or three separate images?

Auerbach's Piano Trio No. 1 is one of her earliest works, with fascinating allusions to19th- and 20th-century musical traditions, yet with the addition of very specific effects which imbue her music with a unique spectrum of colors. The influence of Shostakovich is audible in Auerbach's Piano Trio No. 1, and this disc opens with Shostakovich's Piano Trio No. 2. The opening movement is a paradoxical combination of rigorous counterpoint and ethereal harmonics, followed by a more forceful, rustic and ironic second movement. A mournful passacaglia follows, and the work concludes with a haunting ‘Dance of Death.

Naxos Records, one of the world's leading classical music labels, released a cd with pianotrios of Russian composers Taneyev and Borodin, performed by the Dutch Delta Piano Trio. The relatively unknown trios of these great composers haven't previously been released by the label and for the Delta Piano Trio this marks their debut on CD. The highly romantic Piano Trio Op. 22 by Sergei Taneyev (1856-1915), student and close friend of Tchaikovsky and teacher of both Scriabin and Rachmaninov, is characterized by a subtle use of counterpoint, lyrical expressivity and virtuosic fireworks. Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), a composer, doctor and chemist, was a member of the ‘Mighty Handful,’ a group of Russian prominent composers who aimed to incorporate more Russian musical influences in their music and were less influenced by the Western European composing tradition. Glinka saw Borodin's unfinished, but brilliant piano trio as a model of a new style of typically Russian music.