Beethoven wrote his Triple Concerto, op. 56, for violin, cello, and piano at a time when he was contemplating a permanent move from Vienna, a city he loathed, to Paris, one he would never see. In his spellbinding biography Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, Jan Swafford speculates that the concerto’s “singular and sometimes backward-looking style” reflects the composer’s desire to appeal to French taste. “Gorgeous but peculiar, expensive and impractical to perform,” Swafford writes, “the Triple Concerto would never really catch on.” Well, here it is! The French conductor Laurence Equilbey paces an excellent all-Canadian threesome, each soloist a laureate of the orchestra’s yearly talent search: the violinist Blake Pouliot in 2016, the cellist Bryan Cheng in 2019, the internationally established pianist Angela Hewitt in 1975. The French romantic composer Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor, op. 32, another rarity, completes the program. —Matthew Gurewitsch