Three years ago, when giving us Schumann's first 'official' Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 63 (reviewed in 3/92), the Fontenay Trio coupled it with an A major work thought (but still not wholly proven) to have come from the youthful Brahms rather than with Schumann's own earliest experiments with piano, violin and cello – the four miniatures subsequently published under the title Fantasiestucke as his Op. 88. So for anyone seeking the complete Schumann in this genre, there is obviously strong competition from the Borodins and Beaux Arts, whose mellow two-disc sets both include Schumann's Op. 88 in preference to any outsider. But taken on its own merits, this new Fontenay coupling of the Second and Third Trios has plenty to commend it in youthful verve and vividness of characterization, particularly welcome in No. 3 in G minor, where excessive repetition of initially arresting ideas can so easily sound merely patterned.
Bigger tests come in the more personally motivated F major work, composed exactly ten years after Schumann's clandestine engagement to his beloved Clara, with the opening phrase of his 1840 love-song Intermezzo (''In the depths of my heart I keep a radiant image of you'') as the secret underlying clue. Its introduction by the violin in the course of the first movement's development, though heartfelt, is surely just a little too backward. And I would also question the almost aggressive accentuation of the pianist (a player certainly never backward in coming forward) in this movement's launching theme. All three artists respond warmly to the slow movement's Mit innigem Ausdruck, and they honour the third movement's slowish metronome marking rather than transforming it into a scherzo. Their relish of its quaint coda is particularly arresting. The recording is forward and bright albeit a bit hard.
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