The novelty on this disc is sandwiched between the masterpieces of Ravel and Fauré. Mel Bonis was a Frenchwoman, born the same year as Puccini and dying the same year as Ravel. She lived a colourful life, though constantly had to battle to be taken seriously as a composer (hence changing her name from Mélanie to the more ambiguous Mel). Though her parents were eventually persuaded to let her enter the Paris Conservatoire, she was swiftly removed after falling in love with the ‘wrong’ man and rapidly married off to someone deemed more appropriate (though love would out and she later resumed her affair). When Saint-Saëns heard Bonis’s First Piano Quartet he unwittingly summed up her situation: ‘I would never have thought a woman was capable of writing that.’ She left behind a lot of music, encompassing many genres, and two works here date from 1907. Soir melds a natural gift for melody with a clarity of writing that is very affecting (and slightly reminiscent of Saint-Saëns), while the light-as-air Matin is texturally inventive and most alluringly played.

What’s refreshing about Trio George Sand’s readings is the way they enter so fully the individual worlds of these very different composers. It’s also apparent that here are three musicians outstanding in their own right and there’s much to delight in, for instance, the way violinist Virginie Buscail withdraws her sound to a thread as she joins cellist Nadine Pierre and pianist Anne-Lise Gastaldi in the opening movement of the Fauré, or the quiet tragedy expressed by the cello in the Ravel’s ‘Passacaille’. But it’s not all about withdrawn, delicate playing – the climaxes in the Ravel are lusciously unfettered. And these players are unafraid to explore the dizzying changeability of the second-movement ‘Pantoum’, while luxuriating in the cod-orientalism of the finale. Impressive, too, is the sense of inevitability with which each piece unfolds.

Of course the competition in the case of the Ravel and Fauré trios is intense. But this trio certainly holds it own, even up against the Florestan Trio. The compelling Capuçon/Angelich reading of Fauré’s Piano Trio, in the recent box from Virgin, was, alas, compromised by recording quality. Trio George Sand make a desirable addition to the catalogue, then, for the two mainstream works just as much as for the Bonis.