Bertrand Chamayou, whose performances of Saint-Saëns’s Second and Fifth Piano Concertos with the French National Orchestra and Emmanuel Krivine won Gramophone’s Recording of the Year Award in 2019, turns to the composer’s chamber music for his latest album. He’s joined by Renaud Capuçon and Edgar Moreau for a sonata apiece, followed by the E minor Piano Trio, the disc’s high point, a beautifully proportioned, wonderfully even-handed performance, done with an understated virtuosity that allows the work’s emotional ambiguities to fully register.

Saint-Saëns’s piano-writing is nothing if not exacting here, but where some interpreters can be overemphatic at the start, Chamayou really does play the opening chords très légerement (thus the score), giving the strings space to breathe and sing, before the movement reaches a climax that seems immense without being unduly weighty. The bittersweet mood of the inner movements is finely captured, with the 5/8 Allegretto broadening from hesitancy to lyricism, the Andante con moto all wistful nostalgia and the lilting Grazioso more waltz than scherzo. The finale, fugal and anti-Romantic, can sometimes feel like a peremptory call to order after what has gone before, though Chamayou, Capuçon and Moreau find wit and brilliance amid the counterpoint. It’s a superbly engaging, at times challenging interpretation that ranks among the finest: whether you prefer the warmer lyricism of the Florestan Trio in this work (Hyperion, 5/06) or the altogether darker tone of The Gould Trio (Champs Hill, 7/18) is ultimately a matter of taste.

The understated virtuosity that characterises the Trio also extends to its companion pieces. With Chamayou matching him phrase for phrase, Capuçon’s way with the D minor Violin Sonata is utterly compelling in its combination of lyricism, reined-in (if at times fierce) articulation, and drive, his dark sweetness of tone proving utterly beguiling in the grand theme that forms the opening movement’s second subject before returning at the climax of the finale, which he plays with superb dexterity here.

I was fractionally less convinced, though, by Moreau in the C minor Cello Sonata. The issue, I suspect, is one of scale. Saint-Saëns’s earliest string sonata, it dates from 1872, and it needs, perhaps, the grander, more overtly dramatic approach of Mats Lidström and Bengt Forsberg (Hyperion, 5/00). In a beautifully written booklet note, Tully Potter outlines the difficult personal circumstances in which the work was composed and describes the cello-writing as ‘almost grumpy at times’. Moreau certainly sounds gruff in places, and the slow movement, with its chorale theme shuttled between the two players, is most beautifully done. But elsewhere we could do with more warmth in the cello tone, and a broader emotional palette in the lyrical passages that offset the disquiet. It remains an impressive disc, nevertheless, though one to which you might find yourself returning for the Piano Trio above all.