Naturally, the big personality here is Barenboim. Not Daniel but Michael Barenboim, his violinist son, himself an estimable soloist in concert and on disc, and leader of his father’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. It may be a result of the vagaries of recording this combination of piano and strings – notoriously difficult to balance ideally – but it is the violin, not the piano, that is consistently, insistently the sound that dominates these performances.

That’s not to say that Barenboim père sinks into the background. He’s a pianist who never passes up an opportunity to play to the back of the hall; and while he is a model of chamber-music give-and-take once the music gets under way, hear the way he opens, say, the G major Trio (K496) as if it were a solo piano sonata. Compare that with the more self-effacing musicianship of (to pick just two examples close at hand) Susan Tomes for the Florestan Trio or Maria João Pires with Augustin Dumay and Jian Wang – both recordings in which, in startlingly different ways, parity between the three instruments is achieved and held within a continuous equilibrium with a naturalness that is absent here.

Then there is the tone of Barenboim fils’s violin: perhaps again it is the placing of the microphones but it rarely falls gratefully on the ear. Passing over such moments as the vulgar swoop at the violin entry in the slow movement of the B flat Trio (K502), there is an unvarying abrasiveness to his sound that becomes increasingly wearing – an edge that was not an issue on these players’ Mozart piano quartets from the same venue (A/18) – especially at a moment such as the chugging accompaniment figure at the outset of K496’s closing variations, or passages above the stave in the Allegro of the C major Trio (K548). Poor Kian Soltani, struggling to be noticed alongside these two larger-than-life musical characters. He honestly doesn’t put a foot (or a finger) wrong.

These recordings are taken live from the Pierre Boulez Saal in central Berlin. Some ornaments sound as if they didn’t fall easily under the fingers in performance and there is in quite a lot of the music a sound like fingernails on keys, which especially makes listening on headphones less pleasurable still. The Florestan Trio remain a prime digital recommendation in the five piano trios (No 2 is K498, the Kegelstatt, for clarinet, viola and piano) and the early Divertimento; Pires et al only recorded three of the six works, more’s the pity.