Eighteenth-century keyboard trios were regularly billed as ‘sonatas for the harpsichord or fortepiano, with the accompaniment of violin and violoncello’. You would hardly guess that pecking order from these performances. If you’ve heard Riccardo Minasi’s Baroque performances you’ll know that he is no shrinking violet. His playing here is as lively and inventive as you’d expect. Yet time and again he upstages Maxim Emelyanychev’s fortepiano – say, at the opening of the early G minor Trio (No 5), where the touches of violin countermelody virtually swamp the principal line in the keyboard.

The prime problem is the close recording of the violin in an ultra-resonant acoustic. Even allowing for that, you suspect that Minasi is on a mission to elevate the violin’s role in Haydn’s trios, dominating at the slightest provocation, and, as recorded, employing a much wider dynamic range than the reproduction Anton Walter fortepiano can muster. The results can be exciting, as when Minasi lets rip in the finale of the otherwise innocuous B flat Trio (No 13), enthusiastically abetted by the cello. Too often, though, the ear is distracted by over-intrusive accompanying figuration, not least in the musing Adagio of the Gypsy Trio.

While I never quite adjusted to the balance, especially when it mutes Emelyanychev’s delicately inflected lines in the slower music, it’s hard to deny the energy and devil-may-care exuberance of these violin-led performances. Exploiting the percussive, astringent potential of period instruments, the players attack the Minuet and finale of the G minor Trio with a vehemence that would not be out
of place in early Beethoven. Impetuous (occasionally rushed) rhythms and aggressively pounding accents likewise rule in the triple-time finale of the C minor Trio (No 26). Predictably, too, the ‘Rondo, in the Gipsies’ stile’, as Haydn dubbed it, lives on a knife-edge, with Minasi morphing into the most flamboyant of Hungarian fiddlers.