While there’s a train of thought these days that full-fat Brahms is bad for you, that tradition is alive and well in these unashamedly Romantic accounts from the Greenwich Trio.

They launch their cycle with the Second Trio and immediately you’re struck by their technical assurance, the strings well balanced so the keyboard doesn’t dominate. The opening Allegro has a good impetus to it, though I wanted more shades of piano and pianissimo. But what seems to be lacking in the Greenwich’s playing is strong characterisation: the string phrases at the start of the slow movement, for instance, are merely legato, whereas Kavakos and Ma allow more air into them, to highly expressive effect. Or, further into the movement, the vehement writing (from 3'30") is merely loud, whereas in the hands of Dumay/Wang/Pires there’s a palpable collective fury, as there is in the classic Suk/Starker/Katchen reading, which continues to thrill despite its age. The Scherzo, a movement that strikes fear into pianists, is technically unimpeachable but (again) short on atmosphere – Ax and co are just a shade slower but much creepier. In the finale, again, things go at a good lick, the ensemble precise, but passages such as the chromatically unsettled writing from 1'37" pass for relatively little, the players sounding much more at home as they reach the forte writing.

If it seems tough to be comparing the group with such musical heavyweights, that, I fear, is inevitable in such a crowded field. That said, the coupling is a real rarity: the Second String Sextet as transcribed by Brahms’s friend Theodor Kirchner (he also transcribed the First Sextet, which presumably will be on the menu at a later date). Kirchner did a sufficiently fine job that he got Brahms’s blessing, but there are places where there is no substitute for the strings-only original: for example the opening, where the trill originally assigned to viola 1 sounds rather less disembodied on the piano. On the other hand, passages such as the lustrous cello theme (from 1'58") translate well here. What is needed above all is conviction and a strong sense of a dramatic narrative unfolding before our ears; here the long first movement felt, well, long. To be fair, the Jean Paul Trio don’t provide all the answers either and in terms of tempo, I prefer the new account of the Scherzo, with the Presto giocoso section turned into a pleasingly stomping dance. In the Adagio, I was left pondering the question of whether it was asking the impossible to render the glories of Brahms’s variation-writing in any form other than an all-strings line up. And, again, the finale loses the tension of its Mendelssohnian theme when it’s grounded with a keyboard instrument. Overall, though, I was left with the niggling feeling that, in the hands of more inspired musicians, Kirchner’s remodelling could have worked better.