Some of Haydn’s most charming and relaxed music is to be found in his piano trios, many of them composed for virtuoso lady pianists of his acquaintance. One such was Therese Jansen-Bartolozzi, the recipient of the first two works in the Florestan’s second volume of trios (Vol 1 was reviewed 4/09). Therese Jansen was a German pianist who had settled in London with her father, and had studied the piano with Clementi; Haydn was a witness at her wedding to Gaetano Bartolozzi, an art dealer, and composed three piano trios for her. Jansen was clearly quite a pianist, and the Florestans display their customarily virtuosity, elegance and caprice in these outwardly easy-going works, once again capturing the full (and deceptively wide) emotional range of what may appear on the surface to be merely domestic entertainment music. The shifting bass-line of the darkly Baroque Allegretto of the E major Trio (No 28) shows that this music is so much more than that, and so too does the opening movement of Trio No 31, in the utterly un-Classical key of E flat minor. Peter Quantrill has already chosen this disc as a highlight of the past year (12/09), and I can do little better than to echo his description of it as “a disc of…good serious fun”.

La Gaia Scienza offer an alternative approach to Haydn’s trios. Nos 15-17 were composed for the traditional piano trio line-up but eventually published for flute (rather than violin), cello and piano, and that is how they are performed here. The star on this period-instrument recording, though, is the copy of a Ludwig Dulcken (Dresden, 1790s) fortepiano, a clangorous presence in these vivacious performances. The surprise on the disc, though, is the Surprise Symphony in a 1793 arrangement by Ludwig Wenceslaus Lachnith for flute and piano trio. Never normally a fan of these chamber eviscerations of Haydn’s symphonies, no matter how contemporary and/or authentic, I’ve none the less been quite taken by this performance. The minuet is omitted, as is the gorgeous woodwind variation in the slow movement; and perhaps the skittering string passages don’t sit completely comfortably under the fingers of fortepianist Federica Valli. But it’s an ingenious arrangement and it’s boldly and winningly played.