It’s wise to leave preconceptions at the door while listening to this captivating programme of Brahms clarinet works. The musicians play period instruments – not copies but actual clarinets, piano and cello the composer would have known and expected to hear in his creations.

Employing historical instruments is no guarantee that interpretations will prove searching or persuasive, yet what the clarinettist Marie Ross, pianist Petra Somlai and cellist Claire-Lise Démettre achieve is music-making that seizes attention, for many reasons. In addition to the clarity the period instruments can realise, the musicians impart to each score subtleties of tempo, phrasing and nuance that bring these seminal pieces into fresh focus.

The performances are more spacious – in some cases strikingly so – than usually encountered, especially on modern instruments. The second movement of the second Op 120 Sonata, for example, begins in broad gestures and continues with a middle section in which the players take the Sostenuto marking seriously, without a hint of ponderousness. As treated here, the music attains a heightened nobility.

Keen attention to expressive possibilities and flexibility pervades every movement on this recording. Gradations of dynamics are shown to be crucial in propelling phrases and allowing them to relax. Ross plays each clarinet (B flat for the sonatas, A for the Trio) with masterful fluidity and animation, minus vibrato, and Somlai brings commanding sensitivity to Brahms’s formidable piano challenges on an 1875 New York Steinway. Démettre, using gut strings and a Romantic bridge, applies bits of portamento that bring ear-opening touches to what we might have thought were familiar lines.