The final decade and a half of Rubbra's composing career, after the completion of ‘Hommage to Teilhard’, saw the production of twenty-eight works (Opp. 137–64), including the final three symphonies. In 1969 he completed Discourse for cello and harp, discussed on p. 162, and one piece from 1970 was a short (two-movement) but very intense Second Piano Trio (Op. 138) that encapsulates decades of piano-trio writing between Brahms's string–piano dualism and the bristling vitality of Fauré's late chamber music; Rubbra had after all spent half a lifetime as a member of such an ensemble. Commissioned by the Evesham Music Club for its twenty-first birthday, it received its first performance there in 1970, with the Rubbra–Gruenberg–Pleeth Trio resurrected for one last time. The music's brooding intensity is a harbinger of things in the Sinfonia Sacra, and near the end of the first movement a passage with the strings in octaves against granite-like piano chords could suggest, like moments in its predecessor, that Rubbra had listened with some interest to Messiaen. The brief second movement is marked ‘Allegretto scherzando’, but the game or joke is a fairly tight-lipped one tailing off into a middle section that recaptures the intensity from the start of the work, with the main idea allowed only a few seconds by way of ‘repeated A-section’. The Trio closes as it began, in deep thoughtfulness.