Pianist Polina Leschenko’s contribution to the booklet of this new album with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Reto Bieri is an essay on tomatoes. ‘They were red, orange, yellow, blue; in shape they could be thin, fat or even bizarre’, she writes, ‘but coming warm from the sunny garden on the table they offered a whole variety of sensuous tastes.’ And if you can warm to that sort of quirkiness, you’ll probably click with this absolute riot of a recital, which begins by easing seductively into a tiny Poulenc waltz and ends with (by now) all five players whooping their heads off and what sounds like a violin being smashed over the back of a chair.

I swear I’m not making this up: never, surely, has a programme centred around these three substantial works (Bartók’s Contrasts, Paul Schoenfield’s klezmer-flavoured Trio and Poulenc’s late Clarinet Sonata) set quite so many ideas flying, or provoked such an explosion of colour. You’d expect nothing less, of course, from virtuosos as extrovert as these, but still, it dazzles as the three players switch, in the blink of an eye, from the demurest of café trios to outright sonic hooliganism. There are sul ponticello shivers, feral folk-band screeches, balletic piano cascades and every conceivable shade of vibrato, from synagogue-Kantor wobble to bleached-out purity.

And amid the flashing, needlepoint brilliance and headlong energy, there are moments – such as the slow movements of the Bartók and the Schoenfield – where these three play with such tender, whispered refinement that even the stoniest sceptic would have to concede that they clearly mean every note. Bieri and Leschenko’s urgent, poetic account of Poulenc’s death-haunted sonata is as powerful as any I’ve heard. This disc is provocative, it’s flamboyant – but it’s never, ever, dull.