Naxos really are doing John Ireland proud at the moment. Hard on the heels of the final instalment in John Lenehan’s piano music series (10/08) and the clarinet-led chamber anthology with Robert Plane and colleagues (6/09) comes this stylish new recording of the composer’s three piano trios. Actually, anyone who has already snapped up the latter disc will quickly discover that Ireland profitably plundered material from the Clarinet Trio in D (1912-13) for the last of his piano trios. Completed in 1938 and dedicated to Walton, this is one of Ireland’s most effortlessly fluent and approachable works, crammed full of memorable invention and displaying a comprehensive understanding of the medium.

The Gould Piano Trio lend it exquisitely refined, infectiously eager advocacy (though Yfrah Neaman, Julian Lloyd Webber and Eric Parkin on Lyrita quarry rather more in the way of piercing intensity from the deeply felt slow movement), and it is preceded by similarly lithe and luminous accounts of the endearing Phantasie Trio and magnificent Second Trio from 1917 – a much darker, impassioned wartime creation (you can almost visualise the troops’ weary trudge in the Allegro giusto some three minutes in) and close sibling to the superb Second Violin Sonata from just a few months previously (the piece that secured the composer’s reputation overnight).

Fine-spun readings by Lucy Gould and Benjamin Frith of four charming miniatures for violin and piano (finishing with the seemingly indestructible The Holy Boy) push the playing time up to just over the hour mark. Admirable production values (Michael Ponder, working in Potton Hall) and booklet-notes (Bruce Phillips, Chairman of the John Ireland Trust) further boost the appeal of a thoroughly desirable release.