Excerpt from Benjamin Ivry’s biography “Francis Poulenc” about the trio, originally written for oboe, bassoon and piano.

Poulenc was consciously pursuing a neo-classical ideal, bearing in mind the examples of Stravinsky and Debussy. The latter’s last sonatas were an attempt to revive the French classicism of Couperin’s Concerts royaux. In his Trio for piano, oboe and bassoon which saw its first performance in 1926, Poulenc also strove for elegant symmetries and began the piece with an introduction in the French Baroque style. The work is in the traditional form of three movements, Presto, Andante and Rondo, and in an attempt to show that he was interested in musical form, Poulenc explained that the trio’s first movement follows the form of a Haydn Allegro and the final Rondo, the Scherzo of Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2.
Yet he retains a slightly ironic attitude to the Baroque tradition; the trio, for example, begins as if three card players are sadly telling each other tales of woe (Poulenc was a bridge addict). The wind instruments play a variation on the military ‘Taps’ – the bugle melody that mourns the military dead – while elliptical piano chords anticipate the jazz style of Duke Ellington; the three then burst into a brisk skedaddle and the conversation piece style continues, even when the oboe has lovely lyric phrases and the pianist can indulge in splashy descending chords. The trio, one of Poulenc’s first mature productions, is an early model of his best qualities: balance, proportion, lyricism, humour, simplicity and clarity.

This trio was also one of the first pieces to have been recorded by a chamber music composer, in 1928, with oboe, bassoon and piano! Excerpt from a Poulenc biography by Nichols:

The change in 1925 from acoustic to electric recording persuaded many doubters that the gramophone was here to stay and its superior trustworthiness over the player-piano could now come fully into its own. In 1928 Poulenc engaged with the new system on two fronts, as both pianist and critic. The considerable speed of the faster numbers (the ‘Rondeau’ from Les Biches and the third Mouvement perpétuel) leads to some untidy playing, but overall there is an unmistakable authority and character, and thanks to the speed of the latter the slow final bars acquire a magic glow. Poulenc had to record the two excerpts from Les Biches several times, not liking the sound he made on playback. Finally the recording engineer said that ‘as I preferred “the American taste”, he’d move my Pleyel further away. You can see that in gramophone language “American taste” means something entirely different from what it does to champagne merchants. In the other work, the Trio, the special timbres of the French oboe and bassoon and the superb phrasing of Messieurs Lamorlette and Dhérin still enchant ninety years later.

And you can still hear this 1928 recording on Youtube!…