There’s a big picture of Lars Vogt just inside the booklet. He’s not actually playing, but this disc immortalises a concert given at the Spannungen festival he founded in 1998, a concentrated, vaguely alternative week-long event held annually at the Art Nouveau hydro-electric power station of Heimbach. The word ‘Spannungen’ denotes ‘voltage’, ‘tension’ ‘excitement’ and ‘suspense’, and the series has a cult following. On this occasion, the piano stool is occupied by Artur Pizarro, logically enough since the 1990 Leeds International Piano Competition winner (Vogt came second) is currently recording all Rachmaninov’s solo piano music. Christian Tetzlaff might not be the first violinist you think of in connection with Romantic Russia, but with and without his sister Tanja he has set down a remarkable range of repertoire with purity, poise and just enough idiomatic intuition.

‘When you come to Heimbach,’ says Tanja Tetzlaff, ‘it’s like coming home.’ Collectors have different priorities of course, and those wedded to physical format will probably prefer the echt Russian alternative from Boris Berezovsky and friends, if only because their CD finds room for a substantial makeweight in Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio. This one is more in the nature of a sophisticated one-off but deserves to find an audience beyond Germany’s Eifel hills. The vibrato favoured by the siblings is less insistent than that of rivals and Pizarro only pushes his instrument towards hardness at the start of the finale, where the barnstorming rhetoric is difficult to deal with any other way.

The Trio élégiaque remains an oddly balanced entity (the composer was only 20 when he wrote it and the score was not published complete in his lifetime), but such a committed and carefully calculated interpretation can only bolster its standing. Be warned that virile and enthusiastic whooping breaks out following the final bars of despondent reprise. There’s no hint of the palm court about this expertly engineered production.