The finest music ever composed by a Breton naval officer

There’s a special art in making something difficult appear effortless, and the string trio is a supreme test. It’s the smallest viable unit for string chamber music: with one each of violin, viola and cello, there’s no fat, no redundancy, and nowhere to hide for composer and performer alike. And yet its greatest masters – Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven (Schoenberg is a special case, as he usually is) – make it sound like a trifle, a recreation. They’re on a tightrope, but they can’t stop dancing.

It’s a perfect medium, in other words, for a certain kind of Gallic genius, and I knew one of the pieces on this disc already – the skittering divertissement of a Trio by Jean Françaix, the last of the neoclassical wits, who died in 1997 after several decades of people expressing surprise that he was still alive at all. It’s played with panache and a nice spritz of drollery by the young Berlin-based Boccherini Trio, and recorded with the pristine clarity for which BIS has become a byword.

I could take or leave Eugène Ysaÿe’s big, single-movement trio, though for my money his sulky chromaticism is more palatable in trio form than in his famous solo violin sonatas. But it’s always good to hear from Jean Cras, a Breton naval officer and pupil of Duparc. His shipmates called him ‘Admiral Arpeggio’ and he composed his only string trio in 1926 aboard the light cruiser Lamotte-Picquet. There’s a Ravel-like grace about Cras at his best, coupled to a bracing, folksy melodic vigour that’s unlike anything else in French music. And you won’t hear him played better than this.