Last year I wrote enthusiastically about the Brahms trios recorded by Nicholas Angelich with Renaud and Gautier Capuçon. This new version of the first two trios is also very finely played; which one you prefer is likely to be a matter of taste. Lucy Gould and her colleagues play Op 8’s first movement suavely, with lovely tone and refined expression. The Capuçon/Angelich account is intense and full bloodied; the darker episodes have a more menacing air, and you may well feel that this work, which even in its 1889 revision shows Brahms in his most Romantic vein, benefits from this grander, more forceful presentation.

In the Scherzo, by contrast, the Gould Trio, with their lightness of touch, make a special, slightly sinister effect in the quiet passages and, by this delicacy, enhance the explosive impact of the sudden fortes. In the finale, too, the more clearly articulated Gould version, with Benjamin Frith’s ringing tone and virtuoso panache making the most of the brilliant piano writing, has a strength that the freer, more expansive French recording doesn’t quite achieve.

Similar contrasts reappear in the Second Trio – the Gould’s superb control and rhythmic precision brings the symphonic argument of the first movement and the Scherzo’s nocturnal rustlings into sharp relief. Angelich and the Capuçons, with their greater weight of tone and, it must be said, a fuller, more resonant recording, are able to characterise especially vividly the Andante’s variations and the different episodes in the finale. And their strongly emotional tone pays dividends in the beautiful reflective episode at the start of the last movement’s coda.

There’s a lot to be gained from both these recordings; if I had to choose I’d still go for Capuçon/Angelich, because of their spontaneity and the intensity of their involvement with the music.