John Holt’s eighth recording for Crystal begins with eight pleasant recital pieces before finishing with a chamber music masterwork, Eric Ewazen’s Trio for trumpet, violin and piano. Written in 1992 and recorded several times since – including by Chris Gekker, who commissioned it, and longtime New York Philharmonic principal Philip Smith – the four-movement Trio begins with a complex Andante ranging from limpid to stormy, during which the three instruments strive to find congenial planes of existence before the piano knits together fragmented gestures from the violin and trumpet into a unified voice. The style is rhapsodic and the retro sentiment hearkens back to cooler, jazz-inspired rhythms of the 1950s.

Holt’s playing throughout is fluent, and so casually virtuosic that it integrates easily with the other instruments; he has an ear for the interior colours of his instrument that occasionally suggests the warmth of a flugelhorn. Maria Schleuning, from the Dallas Symphony, is less aggressive and more sympathetic than the violinist on Gekker’s recording; her quivering double-stops create a haunted opening for the Adagio that sets the stage for Holt’s superb arioso, which he ends exquisitely, almost without vibrato. The Allegro molto finale gallops to its close fuelled by cross-rhythms suggesting Brahms’s Horn Trio.

In the most notable of the recital pieces, Holt shows a sad, reflective quality in Ennio Porrino’s Prelude, sports golden high notes in Eugène Bozza’s Rustiques with French Impressionist flourishes from pianist Steven Harlos, and sails brilliantly through Alexander Goedicke’s Concert Etude, with its echoes of the last movement of Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto.