The Busch Trio have been garnering glowing reviews in 19th-century repertoire. Now they show themselves equally at home in the two major 20th-century repertoire standards.

All four movements of the Ravel reveal distinction of one kind or other. The opening is hauntingly suspended in a realm of dreamlike evocation. The accelerando feels a little precipitate, perhaps, but in the context of such flexible, subtly shaded playing, that’s a perfectly justifiable choice. The second movement takes wing as it should, being feather-light and forceful by turns, and the slow movement also strikes a fine balance between chasteness and sensuality. When Ravel pushes the medium to the limit in the finale’s ecstatic concluding pages, all three artists rise to the occasion. All in all, this is a very different experience from the classic Menuhin, Cassadó and Kentner 1960 recording (10/61) but a no less valid one in my book, and if anything, it could be argued, even more idiomatic.

The Busch’s Shostakovich also has much to commend it, along with a number of more debatable points. As with the Ravel, though even more so, the first movement is expressively defined by acceleration, but the finest performances are those that delay that process a little more than the Busch Trio do, making us want it before it is actually granted. Also, while I like the idea behind the pianist’s rich pedalling towards the end, I do feel he overdoes it for the sake of making his point.

Nothing to complain about in the Scherzo, unless it be to note that Oistrakh, in the composer’s second recording, is hors concours for combined weight and velocity. In the passacaglia third movement, my preference is for a more severe, strictly metronomic opening; but the stoical string-playing later on, eschewing over-personalised vibrato, is right on the money.

Of course the finale is the dominating impression one takes away from the piece, and here, as in the first movement, I think the drama works better if the accelerando (not marked, but sanctioned by both of Shostakovich’s own recordings) is delayed and resisted until the last possible moment, until the pain is finally lanced in the piano’s arpeggiated recall of the passacaglia theme. Under the heading of minor quibbles, I find the piano a fraction too present in the opening bars, and the sudden drop in dynamics in the Jewish freylechs theme insufficiently drastic and attention-grabbing.

All in all, then, this is undoubtedly a first-rate issue, but for my shortest of shortlists I think I would nominate the Busch Trio’s Ravel but not quite their Shostakovich.