The Fidelio Trio’s advocacy of British music continues with this disc of piano trios from Scottish (and Scottish-based) composers. The Seafarer Trio (2000) finds Sally Beamish combining words and music in a direct and often confrontational manner – the Anglo-Saxon poem (as translated by Charles Harrison Wallace) spoken over a score of often brooding intensity, whose five continuous sections parallel the marine and latterly existential journey in most essentials. Parallel though without necessarily integrating as, despite the sombre poise of Alexander McCall Smith’s narration and the Fidelio’s often acute rendering of the music’s restive atmosphere, the overall impression remains one of elements that complement each other at a remove: the music tending to form an atmospheric yet often distanced backdrop to the magisterial text.

The other two pieces are shorter and more economical. Piano Trio Two (2004) is Judith Weir’s envisaging of a “Zen piano trio”, its intensive but always deft instrumental interplay centring on the sometimes fractious relationship between melody and accompaniment – though, as often with this composer, a sense of attainable harmony prevails. Derived by Nigel Osborne from his eponymous opera, The Piano Tuner (2006) falls into eight brief movements; five “preludes” and three “fugues” whose evident fascination with the synthesis between Western and south-east Asian tuning climaxes in the limpid pathos of “Song and Loss” and the circling obsessiveness of “Fractal Counterpoint”. Absorbing in spite (or because?) of its fragmentary continuity, it rounds off a thought-provoking release – recorded and annotated to Delphian’s customary high standards.