Extraordinary as it sounds, I think this may be the first time that the string-ensemble chamber music of Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn has been paired together on a recording, rather than with corresponding works by Robert and Felix. At the very least it’s a first from a major ensemble, and the impression of this music being taken seriously on its own merits only intensifies when you press play.

First up is Schumann’s Piano Trio in G minor. Composed in 1846, before Robert composed his Third Trio in the same key, this work thoroughly busted all preconceptions of its time over what constituted feminine-sounding music and about the female capacity to deal with rigorous form – listen out for the fugal writing in the final movement. Indeed, the violinist Joseph Joachim actually commented that he couldn’t believe that ‘a woman could have composed something so sound and serious’; and sound and serious is precisely what The Nash Ensemble have given us. This is a strong, proud, full-blooded reading, full of contrasts in tone, attack and mood, nuanced in its colourings, its phrasing and overall architecture deftly shaped, long lines soaring taut and strong, choppy tempestuousness tightly knit, strings sounding bright and clean against the piano’s warm tones. These are readings that firmly place Schumann’s music not in a salon but in a concert hall.

Likewise Mendelssohn’s Trio in D minor with its Sturm und Drang, Simon Crawford-Phillips rising with elegant broodiness to the stormily tossing and turning virtuosity of its opening piano figures, before the strings meet their own subsequent constant virtuosities with polished panache, always firmly glued together and blending impeccably. Adrian Brendel serves up some especially delicious cello colours: for instance the soft, tense pathos with which he slidingly descends his scale at 9'42", anticipating the movement’s sombre close. Then Crawford-Phillips again thoroughly sets the tone for the finale with his folkily poignant Chopinesque figures in lieu of the strings’ further fire.

Mendelssohn’s Quartet brings more to admire, with the devastating stillness and simplicity of the first movement, the tense momentum of the Allegretto with its bitily gruff flutterings from viola and cello, the Romanze’s deftly spun-out long lines and the fiery pizzazz and crisp energy of the finale.

To say this disc makes the case for Schumann and Mendelssohn standing on their own two feet, away from the music of their menfolk, is something of an understatement.