Talk about a chamber programme scoring off the chart for niche factor. In fact it’s entirely forgivable to have never even heard of Robert Kahn (1865-1951), a German-Jewish composer and teacher who enjoyed a highly successful career, championed notably by Joachim and Brahms, before Nazi persecution necessitated a late-life flight to England, where he lived the remainder of his life in relative obscurity. And while Vincent d’Indy (1851-1931) hasn’t been quite as entirely forgotten since his own lifetime success, he’s hardly mainstream. That can equally be said of piano, clarinet and cello trios, despite the combination being a delectable-sounding one, so I’ll be fascinated to see how the newly formed Bawandi Trio develops repertoire-wise over the coming years. For the moment, though, pianist Mario Häring, clarinettist Patrick Hollich and cellist Alexandre Castro-Balbi have chosen to launch themselves with an attempt to prove that Kahn and d’Indy deserve to be reassessed, based on the hypothesis that it was largely their respective environments – Kahn’s Jewishness and d’Indy’s predilection for German culture – that were responsible for their posthumous neglect.

As far as the d’Indy Trio goes, that hypothesis holds some water. Substantial in length and individual of language, this work in four luxurious-textured movements sounds on the one hand thoroughly French, with fluid lines and harmonies and a finale teeming with capriciously scampering figures, but also with something solidly German in its backbone. The Kahn, meanwhile, was inspired by and modelled on Brahms’s various clarinet chamber works for clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld and sounds as much. So, while it’s indisputably attractive, lyrical and a fine piece of musical workmanship, it doesn’t present Kahn as any more worthy of concerted reassessment than his equally forgotten British contemporary Alexander Mackenzie. Still, the performances themselves are very enjoyable. Both works come imbued with a nice sense of flexibility and flow, the chamber dynamic sounding already well-oiled, and the ensemble’s respective rich, warm tonal qualities satisfyingly sympathetic. The colouring has some lovely detail, too – try 6'20" in d’Indy’s finale, where there’s an especially effective switching of tone and phrasing to produce a wilder folk-song flavour.

The obvious comparison recording is Stephan Koncz, Christoph Traxler and Daniel Ottensamer’s recent ‘The Clarinet Trio Anthology’ (Decca), on which both trios come with a slightly brighter sparkle, not least due to faster tempos. Still, the Bawandi Trio make every bit as much of a case for its more relaxed speeds. So while I’m unconvinced that a Kahn and d’Indy pairing was the way for a trio of such accomplished young musicians to make a high-impact recording debut, lovers of elegantly rendered 19th century rarities need not hesitate.