Just as in his symphonies, Beethoven found a new character, a new mode of expression for each of his piano trios. He held off publishing his Op 1 until 1795 but in this set of trios, composed over the preceding years, he channels the poise of Mozart and the drive of Haydn, with a hefty dollop of distinctive Beethovenian trenchancy already evident. By 1811, when he completed the Archduke, Beethoven, his music and the world had changed, and the work’s serene expansiveness and moods of gentle humour and luminous reflection are, accordingly, a world apart.

Here the Sitkovetsky Trio pair the first of the Op 1 works with perhaps the most startlingly original of the seven full-scale mature trios, the Ghost of 1808. The later work is placed first, bursting out of the traps before giving way to passages of melting lyricism, the interplay between higher and lower strings enjoyed to the full by leader Alexander Sitkovetsky and cellist Isang Enders. The customary crystal clarity of BIS’s sound (in the Markus-Sittikus-Saal, Hohenems) reveals, too, the sinew in the contrapuntal interplay of the development. As for that slow movement, if a group such as, say, the Florestan Trio (at a markedly less sustained tempo) distil a more chilling atmosphere, it’s not for any want of response to the harmonic unease or dynamic shocks on the part of the Sitkovetsky, the strings finding a suitably stark tone and pianist Wu Qian maintaining tension via her exquisitely sensitive touch.

All the Sitkovetsky Trio’s positive attributes, including those identified by Richard Wigmore in his reviews of the previous volumes in this series (6/20, 11/23), are on display in the high spirits of the Ghost’s finale and in the effervescent outer movements of Op 1 No 1, contrast being provided by the early work’s songful Adagio cantabile and by the encore, Enders’s own adaptation of a Cossack air, delightful in its simplicity, that Beethoven arranged for the Edinburgh publisher George Thomson. ‘These performances can hold their own against any rival’, wrote RW of Vol 2, and while my preference in the two works on Vol 3 would be (even if only marginally) for the Florestan, it is hard to disagree.