David Adams (viola), Gould Piano Trio

Stanford: Chamber Music Naxos 8.572452***

There are two big works in this new collection of music by Ireland’s most successful romantic composer, Charles Villiers Stanford: the 1889Piano Trio in E flat and the

1913 Piano Quartet in C minor. Stanford continued to write in a Brahmsian idiom in a world that had already been musically shaken by Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and the quartet epitomises the problems of marginalisation he faced towards the end of his life – the work appears to have had just a single performance, and was never published. It's a gratifyingly well-crafted piece that falls on the wrong side of the divide between musical industriousness and imagination. There's more genuine fibre in the much earlier trio, and the shorter pieces on the disc (two Irish Fantasies and a Legend) go down very easily. See url.ie/af6o