The Feininger Trio here bring together works of two Viennese masters, written when both were young men near the beginning of their experiments with chamber music.

This is a beautiful recording: beautiful playing, beautiful sound. You’d expect no less from an outfit drawn from the Berlin Phil. This recording – the repertoire and the playing – tells a story of togetherness. The Feininger play so precisely together that you can tell the string players spend day in, day out matching their sound and timing in the orchestra. The pieces were composed in both instances for friends, for people whose playing was a known quality. Krenek’s Trio-Fantasie was commissioned by Artur Schnabel for his string trio recitals with Carl Flesch and Gregor Piatigorsky. A young Brahms, only six months into his friendship with the Schumanns, composed his First Piano Trio while staying in Düsseldorf, helping Clara Schumann after Robert’s admission to hospital. With them were Brahms’s friends, violinist Joseph Joachim and cellist Julius Grimm. All four of them will have been involved in playing the work as it came into being. David Riniker’s cello line washes over us in lovely waves, the long phrases and minute details and voicings very sensitively managed. The heartfelt yearning in the interweaving of his and violinist Christoph Streuli’s melodies, so richly and sensitively supported in turn by Adrian Oetiker’s lush piano sound and muscular and grandiose gestures, work to create a rich tapestry. They are not scared to take their time when the music demands it, for instance in the lyrical Adagio.

The Krenek opens with a lilting, pulsing line carried variously by all three partners, with beautiful tone and swooping lines from Streuli’s violin. It is said that after completing the Trio-Fantasie Krenek lost faith with the piece, but the Feininger play it like they believe in it. They read it in a programmatic way, describing it as tracing a ‘profoundly moving … expressive “life curve”’.

It’s hardly surprising that the sound of the recording stands out here, overseen as it was by Tonmeister Christoph Franke, creative producer of the Berlin Phil recordings and Digital Concert Hall. It’s of course a pin-drop shimmery and beautiful sound, but the thing that intrigues me is that the hand-in-glove togetherness of the Feininger’s playing is not directly echoed by the sound recording strategy, which seems to put them in separate envelopes, on different planes, giving them individual clarity and distinction. But when they’re together, they’re really merged – in some of the tutti playing in the first movement, for example, or the duetting of violin and cello in the filigree chants of the third movement. Overall, this feels like a trio recording for the 21st century, full of detail, precision and forthright passion.