The excellent chamber music provider Chamber on the Mountain will present their first concert of 2025 at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 26 in Logan House, at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, 8585 Ojai-Santa Paula Road, Ojai.

The performers will be the internationally celebrated Elixir Trio (Samvel Chilingarian, violin; Fang Fang Xu, cello; and Lucy Nargizyan, (piano) playing a wide selection of piano trios:

“Piano Trio No. 5 in C-Major, K. 548” (1788) by Wolfgang Mozart (1756-91); “Trio élégiaque No. 1 in g-minor” (1892) by Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943); “Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello” (1945) by Gayane Chebotaryan (1918-98); “Piano Trio in g-minor, Opus 17” (1847) by Clara Wieck Schumann (1819-96); and “Piano Trio” (2003) by Jennifer Higdon (born 1962).

Rachmaninov was 18 when he wrote his first “Trio élégiaque.” Some sentimental mystics like to think the young composer was anticipating the loss of his hero, Tchaikovsky, but the older musician was alive and in good health at the time (the disease that killed him came on suddenly, almost two years later).

So, the “elegy” does not have a specific subject, unlike the second “Trio élégiaque” (1893), in which he is openly mourning Tchaikovsky’s death.

Nevertheless, the composer of “Swan Lake” is very much present in both trios, in that both are closely modeled on Tchaikovsky’s “Trio in a-minor for Violin, Cello, and Piano, Opus 50” (1882), which obviously blew young Rachmaninov’s mind when he first heard it (as it blew mine when a friend’s father, a professor of English literature, first put it on the turntable for me, as played by Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, and Artur Rubinstein).

Born in Russia, trained at the Leningrad (St. Petersburg) Conservatory, Chebotaryan, like her esteemed predecessor, Aram Ilyich Khachaturian (1903-78), self-identified as an Armenian. She was a scholar as well as composer, and spent most of her professional life teaching and writing music history at Yerevan Komitas State Conservatory in Armenia.

Except for Khachaturian, whose music I don’t particularly like, I haven’t heard much Armenian music, so I can’t tell if Chebotaryan’s “Trio” resembles the work of her countrymen.

The only music it reminds me of is the “Quintet for Piano & Strings” (1949) by the American (not Armenian) composer, Walter Piston (1894-1976), which, in fact, was written four years after Chebotaryan’s work.

I possess a boxed set of four Schumann piano trios, three by Robert and one by Clara. The only one I return to with any regularity is Clara’s. Clara was not as great a composer as her husband, I suppose, but she was a lot of things he was not, including successful and mentally stable.

Maintaining a 61-year career of concertizing, she managed to raise hers and Robert’s eight children, while caring for her erratic husband until he had to be institutionalized; promoting Robert’s music and that of their friend Johannes Brahms; and composing a respectable amount of damn good music in several forms.

Jennifer Higdon’s “Piano Trio” is harmonically conservative (i.e., accessible), structurally less so, though scarcely ever sounding “radical.” Like most good music, the more I hear it, the more sense it makes.

Tickets to this concert are $40, although the concert is currently sold out. You can try calling them, at 805-646-3381 or taking a chance at showing up at the door, hoping for cancellations. You risk disappointment, but this concert is worth some risk.

For more about this concert, or about Chamber on the Mountain, go to their website.