The line-up – appearing together on disc for the first time – is stellar, of course. All three are seasoned and sensitive chamber musicians. If you like your Mendelssohn rich-toned, spaciously conceived and generously phrased, their expert performances will not disappoint. In the song-without-words slow movements they easily avoid the traps of winsomeness and sentimentality. For my taste, though, they present the composer as an altogether too suave, comfortable figure. Goethe once remarked that Mendelssohn had “the smallest modicum possible of the phlegmatic, and the maximum of the opposite quality”. This quicksilver nervous vitality, a crucial feature of the music as well as the man, is consistently underplayed by the American trio. At way under Mendelssohn’s metronome marking, the impassioned opening movement of the D minor Trio emerges as more elegiaco than Molto allegro agitato, with regretful lingerings in the development where I long for more forward impulse. The steady Scherzo sounds too earthbound, short on that gossamer lightness crucial to the composer. The finale – always a tricky movement to bring off – is broadly, lovingly shaped. But of Mendelssohn’s prescribed appassionato there is none.

In the outer movements of the magnificent C minor Trio – one of a clutch of chamber masterpieces from Mendelssohn’s final years – Ax and his companions likewise short-change the composer’s energico, fuoco and appassionato markings. They stress the Brahmsian gravitas of the first movement (the ruminative tranquillo coda is especially poignant), at the expense of its feverish drive: the soaring second theme, for example (1'38"), quickly loses momentum here. As in the D minor Trio, the Scherzo, which brilliantly recreates the spirit of the Octet with the guile of experience, is all too corporeal, while the finale, again taken at way below Mendelssohn’s marking, tends to trundle rather than soar, with more than a whiff of Victorian pomposity at the massive chorale climax. The names alone guarantee a market for this disc, and the espressivo string melodies are as eloquent as you would expect. But turn to any of the three versions listed above (Trio Wanderer my own favourite, by a whisker) for passion, fantasy and a quintessentially Mendelssohnian restlessness of spirit.