There’s something about Schumann’s piano trios. The music really gets under your skin, more so than many of his works: like the string quartets, this is real musicians’ music. A high standard was set in 1999-2000 by the Florestan Trio, whose Trios Nos 1 and 2 won a Gramophone Award; and just over a decade later the bar was raised by another Award-winning issue by Leif Ove Andsnes with Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff. Recordings keep on coming, which is gratifying for music that was for too long misunderstood, dismissed as the product of Schumann’s failing faculties: further sets have come recently from Ilya Gringolts and friends (Onyx, 7/11) and on period instruments from the Benvenue Trio (Avie, 1/13). The latest arrivals are a two-disc set of all three trios from Australia and the completion of a cycle from Switzerland.

In short, neither of these recordings quite attains the heights achieved by those from the Florestan and Andsnes et al. The First Trio opens in a sound world of Romantic turbulence, which in the hands of the Australian players becomes blustery; neither do they plumb the depths of the slow movement’s despair. They seem happiest, so to speak, in the happier music: the First Trio’s scherzo and finale, the Second’s opening movement. The Third Trio, however, is a different story, its ghostly arabesques telling of a creative mind retreating into itself and finding its own music. Susan Collins’s slightly reedy violin tone arches compellingly through Schumann’s harmonic webs, and the Australian players perfectly dramatise the moment in the middle of the development when it seems as if the three dapper, white-jacketed musicians have been nudged aside by a phantasmagorical jazz trio. Of the three performances here, that of the Third is one to return to.

The Swiss Piano Trio present the Third Trio to complete their set. Violinist Angela Golubeva’s concern to clarify those arabesques is the performance’s undoing: in seeking such clarity, the work’s mystery evaporates. In the fourth movement, exaggerated rubato holds up the joyful release that this finale must necessarily be after so much tense, uneasy music.

The Swiss Trio couple Schumann’s first work for piano trio, the Op 88 Fantasiestücke, along with Clara Schumann’s sole Piano Trio (a work whose recordings now number well into double figures). The Australians offer no makeweight on a two-disc set lasting 86 minutes. The Florestan Trio offer Op 88 and the Piano Quartet; Andsnes and the Tetzlaffs Op 88 and a set of canonic studies. Sad to say, the new discs do not alter one’s preference for these recordings.