With a discography including two volumes of Haydn (Naxos), the piano trios of Saint-Saëns (Guild, 11/14) and newer works by Rob Keeley (Naxos) and Thomas Hyde (Guild), the Aquinas Piano Trio are clearly at home in a wide repertoire, as is reflected in the works heard on this new release.

Interest centres on the Piano Trio (2019) by Lawrence Rose who, now in his late seventies, turned exclusively to composition after a career in law and relocating to Chicago. The work is cast in seven movements, with anticipatory or recollective links drawing these into a cohesive yet intentionally non-seamless whole. Most impressive are the second-movement passacaglia with its combative dialogue for strings and piano, then the final Largo, whose elegiac intensity pointedly underlines those mass shootings and war crimes such as provided the creative spur.

The Aquinas make a persuasive case for this work and sound hardly less assured in the other pieces. The discursive initial movement of the Smetana (1854) is trenchant and forthright but with enough expressive poise to avoid hectoring, while the interplay of dance rhythms in the Scherzo or emotional volatility reaching uneasy catharsis in the finale are tangibly conveyed. Nor does the overall sombreness of Rachmaninov’s G minor (1892) lack expressive variety, its single movement accruing real fervency before withdrawing into Tchaikovskian fatalism.

Those who have the Dvořák Trio’s impetuous Smetana (with Dvořák’s Dumky) or the Gould Trio’s eloquent Rachmaninov (with the Tchaikovsky) can rest content, but those for whom this coupling appeals and who are drawn to the Rose will find this a worthwhile collection. The sound is unexceptionally fine, and Rose’s booklet is thought-provoking.