Great music, boring cello parts was the traditional verdict on Haydn’s keyboard trios. If you got to know these glorious works through the now-classic 1970s Beaux Arts series you might well have agreed, so discreetly balanced was the cello, with pianist Menahem Pressler the undisputed star of the show. More recent recordings from the Vienna Piano Trio, Florestan et al have confirmed the cello’s crucial colouristic and structural role in music predicated on the close interdependence of the instruments. In this opening salvo of a projected complete cycle, Trio Gaspard are likewise a true democracy, relishing Haydn’s unpredictable interplay between piano and violin, and his subtly varied textures, as in the many moments when the cello tellingly migrates to the tenor register.

As Gaspard pianist Nicholas Rimmer explains in an illuminating note, each disc in the series will present a contrasted programme rather than a chronological sequence. So alongside three relatively familiar trios from Haydn’s second London visit (among them the melancholy F sharp minor, No 40, dedicated to Haydn’s lover Rebecca Schroeter), we get a pair of little-played works from the 1780s: the two-movement No 23, with its contrapuntally inclined opening Allegro and darting tarantella finale, and No 20, whose finale indulges in some crazy harmonic deceptions.

With their evident love of the music and minute care in its preparation, the Gaspard are at least a match for the best of their rivals, including the Vienna Piano Trio in Nos 32 and 38 and the Florestan in No 40. Their performances are both vital and finely detailed, with an inner rhythmic life and – crucially in Haydn – a palpable delight in the unexpected. Complementing Rimmer’s crisp pianism (not least in the scintillating finale of No 23), violinist Jonian Ilias Kadesha uses vibrato sparingly for expressive effect, while Vashti Mimosa Hunter provides an eloquent rebuff to the old cliché that Haydn’s cello parts are dispensable add-ons. The Gaspard nicely catch the characteristic mix of lyrical spaciousness and improvisatory quirkiness in the first movements of Nos 32 and 38, while their broad tempo for No 40’s opening Allegro enhances the music’s pensive gravity. They are always alert to the comic-dramatic import of Haydn’s pauses and fermatas; and more than any of the rival groups, they add graceful and witty touches of ornamentation on repeats. The violin’s gleeful whoop up the scale near the start of No 38 is just one delightful instance. Haydn, you sense, would have nodded in approval.

Slow movements tend to be clear-eyed and smartly paced. Taking 4'13" to the Gaspard’s 3'16", the Vienna Piano Trio find a gentle pathos in the A minor Andante of No 32 where the Gaspard are edgy, emphasising Haydn’s staccato bass lines. In similar contrast, No 38’s bare-textured D minor Andante is almost aggressively spiky from the Gaspard. Slyly timing Haydn’s pauses and harmonic sideslips, the Gaspard are in their element in the antic finale of No 20; and cultivating a raw, even raucous tone, they transform themselves into a gypsy band in No 32’s Hungarian polonaise finale. It’s hugely entertaining. Both the Beaux Arts and the Vienna Piano Trio sound distinctly urbane by comparison.

For each volume of their Haydn series the Gaspard will commission a short work that takes its cue from one of the trios on the disc. It’s a neat idea, though I have to say that the repeated loop of Johannes Julius Fischer’s One Bar Wonder, based obsessively on the first phrase of No 20, set my teeth on edge long before the end. But don’t let this subjective reaction put you off an album of joyous, imaginative music-making that whets the appetite for future instalments.