All four Haydn piano trios collected here are from late in the composer’s career but none might really be counted among his most popular works in the genre. There is no repertoire overlap, for example, with acclaimed recordings by the Florestan Trio (Hyperion, 4/09, 1/10), the Vienna Piano Trio (Nimbus, 12/97; MDG), Trio Fontenay (Teldec, 2/99) or Trio Wanderer (Harmonia Mundi, 5/02, 6/18). The C minor work (the conflicting, confusing and non-chronological numbering of the trios is, to say the least, unhelpful) dates from 1789, the other three from 1794 and 1795, when the piano trio was coming to occupy the intimate and confessional places vacated by the string quartet as it effected its emergence as a public concert genre.

Thus this quartet of trios is a canny selection from Trio Gaspard, which adds further desirability when dispatched with the affection and innate understanding that have become hallmarks of the ensemble’s performances. The way they inflect lines – tweaking dynamics, playing with pulse and even giving sudden injections of adrenalin – grows organically from the music itself and never seems tacked on. Trio Gaspard’s manifesto is to perform on modern instruments but ‘informed and inspired by our interest in historical instruments’, and their vibrato-lite but vividly colourful style is enlivened by a free approach to ornamentation from all three instruments, taking a proactive view of the score in a way that might well have been unconscionable to the protagonists of the nascent ‘authentic’ movement of past decades. A fine example is the way they play up to the full the loping, lumbering theme of the variations that open the G major Trio, giving the lie to Richard Wigmore’s verdict on the work as ‘innocuous’ (in his indispensable Faber Pocket Guide to the composer).

In all this, Trio Gaspard are helped by the transparent engineering we have come to expect from this series, especially revealing more than ever before the crucial role of the cello; perhaps the only caveat is that the piano is denied a little warmth by the Potton Hall acoustic. Nevertheless, this is a cycle that continues to go from strength to strength.