The rhetorical question arises, listening to this particular instrumental line-up: why doesn’t every composer write a horn trio? In the question lies the answer: because Brahms and Ligeti set an impossibly high bar. It says something for their success in defining the sound of the genre as a whole that, by their side, this transcription of Mozart’s Horn Quintet comes across as effective, unfailingly congenial, but not so imbued with each individual element’s fullest potential. The piano and violin often mirror each other rhythmically, and both play second fiddle to the horn, however stylish Francesca Dego’s ornamentation or sensitive Martin Owen is to the more melodically interesting parts of his colleagues.

After her experience of recording the concertos with Roger Norrington (10/21, 10/22), Dego nonetheless makes a distinguished Mozartian. Her finespun tone translates well to Brahms, admitting a touch more warmth while doing more with the bow to complement Owen’s rounded cantabile. Meanwhile all three musicians are balanced to best advantage. They attack the trio with gusto, but without getting in each other’s way. Owen casts a spell of faraway enchantment in the Adagio mesto, written like the German Requiem in memory of the composer’s mother, even while using a modern valved horn. Here, too, the sensitively spread chords and bass weight of Alessandro Taverna’s piano make themselves felt to telling effect.

The sense of the uncanny so masterfully evoked by Brahms in the Trio became a hallmark of Ligeti’s music, and this is a magnificently untamed performance, precise in its observation of the opening movement’s many effects of space and distance, yet no less authentically Ligetian in the twisted-clockwork violence of the Vivacissimo. Dego, Owen and Taverna hold nothing back from the March without making it a brittle parody; thus the final lament unfolds, and then collapses, with all the more affecting directness of expression (Dego’s handling of poetic non-vibrato style comes into its own here). The Brahms/Ligeti pairing is hardly new on record but, even without the substantial added attractions of Mozart and Schumann, this version sweeps the board.