Chamber

On the booklet cover, the cables and brickwork of the Brooklyn Bridge, topped by a small American flag, leap out at the prospective listener. Americana obviously must lie within.

And so it does, albeit none of it particularly rooted in New York City. Especially American in flavour is Charles Ives’s Piano Trio from the 1900s, supposedly a musical portrait of the composer’s student days at Yale. If so, little solitary studying seems to have been done, though the music suggests plenty of philosophical discourse, followed by singing, drinking and other fraternity capers, all conveyed in a typical musical fabric of tangled textures and jostled quotations that Ives made his own. The Gould Piano Trio, none of whose players went to Yale, pile into it with the vim and precision expected from this esteemed group, its players all well established as loving devotees of the trio format and for the resurrection of music relatively unknown.

With nine previous recordings, the Anglo-American Rebecca Clarke’s magnificent Piano Trio of 1921 can’t exactly be called unknown, but its gripping progress and harmonic asperity, haunted by a rat-tat-tat motif suggesting the ghostly echo of a bugle from the Great War, still deserves a