It’s not exactly a recipe for cohesion – a collection of little-known works from Armenia, England and Switzerland, representing the players’ countries of origin. Not for nothing, though, do the members of the Chicago-based Lincoln Trio pride themselves on their programme-making skills. Each of these pieces draws on folk music without compromising its individuality; each is a mix of lyricism and biting early-20th-century dissonance. Most importantly, each is fascinating in its own right, and deserves far more attention than it gets.

Among them Rebecca Clarke’s 1921 Trio stands out. Here is a piece as inventive as it is structurally rigorous, consistently impressive in its inter-related themes. But it is the music’s intensity – largely carried by the pungent, late-Romantic harmonies – that grabs us by the shoulders, at least when conveyed as it is here, without inhibition.

Unlike Clarke, who struggled her whole life for artistic success, the Armenian composer Arno Babajanian was a hero in his native land. And yet his music, while less adventurous, similarly evokes an air of deep sadness. It comes to the fore in this trio, which draws on the world of folk, while channelling something of Rachmaninov’s songfulness.

So it’s perhaps just as well that Frank Martin’s Trio sur des mélodies populaires irlandaises takes us elsewhere entirely: a world poised somewhere between America and Ireland. Ironically, there’s nothing very Swiss about this Swiss piece, which you could see as a problem. In between studying the works of Bach, César Franck, American jazz and folk music and the rhythmic theories of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze – the founder of the eurhythmics system of teaching music – Martin never quite got round to developing his own voice. Still, there’s much to appreciate in this music: the rhythmic ingenuity, its sense of charm. The Lincoln give it all the punch and vigour it deserves but it is the poetry of their playing elsewhere in the programme that really makes this disc.