One might suspect that union pressure had been brought to bear, on behalf of all two-handed pianist's "double" contribution to trio playing, so they receive greater recompense than that for "single-line" violin and cello.

But, of course, double stoppings would then have to be carefully surveyed and totted up before the fiddlers had submitted their own invoices, and we would be into a nightmare.

Actually, the Old Market is still saving up for its own (probable, I'm told) Steinway. So hire of an instrument is the prohibitive factor at work in restricting much of each season to the string quartet repertoire.

The man set eagerly loose on the Yamaha — and with Yorkshire zeal — was Benjamin Frith from Sheffield, who combines in The Gould Trio with colleagues from Cardiff and Winchester in violinist Lucy Gould and cellist Alice Neary. They rehearse either in Cardiff or, as this time, on the eve of this concert, in London.

And, boy, did the Tyke have work to do. He got away comparatively lightly, even in Schumann's terms, in his Fantasiestück opus 88, but then came (again, probably) Brahms'attributed posthumous A major Trio.

Ahead for Frith, finally, maybe after compensatory extra helpings of interval coffee, sherry, or fruit juice plus cake, was Mendelssohn's first of his two trios, the one in D minor.

Schumann's easy-going work had plenty of interest and stimuli. Its Humoresque was delivered sometimes like an argumentative rustic dance.

Its slow Duett set some cavernously deep cello from Neary against some ardent violin from Gould.

And its finale came Haydnesque and "Hungarishe", in rousing discourse culminating in an unpredictable conclusion.

The morning's meat came in the Brahms, and I feel it was Brahms, as did Frith, who later disclosed he sensed it was the first trio Brahms wrote.

We know that Brahms burnt the music he did not want hawked among the 19th century equivalent of out-takes.

And to me it sounded like the impassioned young Brahms of his three piano sonatas and the period of his first close acquaintance with his champion Schumann, and his concert-pianist wife, Clara.

However, the rocking second theme of the finale is more Schumanesque than Brahmsian to me — and to Frith, for that more authentic matter. My understanding of a composer's psychology is that Brahms wanted his extant and surviving music to be purely his, with no identifiable traces of contemporary influence.

So the A major had to go. Except somehow, it appears to have given Brahms' bonfire the slip and surfaced 27 years after his passing in 1897. And, forgiving Brahms that second theme, and some of the less characteristic ideas he has in the Lento, thank goodness for that.

The Yamaha just about managed the gigantic sonority Brahms wanted, and Frith hoped to extract. And the work, and moreover the interpretation, had large slices of the expansive intellectual and emotional ambition brimming from the excitingly eventful early Brahms works.

Stirring pedal points, passionate attack. These especially in the Goulds' Vivace reading, in which Brahms dissolved the testosterone with a maturely tender violin theme near its end.

And kicking off the finale is a theme from the pen, I would wager, of no one else.

If the Brahms gave the pianist the largest spotlight, then Mendelssohn plunged Frith virtually into a piano concerto, thanks to the demands of the virtuoso Ferdinand Hiller who hankered to show off (and probably show up the modest string players) in the work's premiere.

Mendelssohn was conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at the time, so writing it this way must have been stimulating for him.

And with the torrent of notes and volume of sound he orders from the piano in the agitated and passionate outer movements, balancing and competing orchestral breadth is needed from Gould and Neary. It came.

The Scherzo was pure orchestral, fantasy Mendelssohn, the piano with the dancing "woodwind parts" before, in the finale, Neary lent a welcome calm to the approach towards the overflowingly exuberant and original ending.

Thus the coming of the Old Market's own piano increased its level of anticipation.

After not one, but two Coffee Concerts in February, the 10th season ends on March 8 (11am) with the Eroica Quartet in Mendelssohn's opus 13 and Beethoven's late opus 132, both in A minor.

But wait. A delicious special bonus comes from the principals of the Hanover Band on period instruments with a narrator.

On May 17, they present Haydn In Love: his Piano Trios in G Hoböken XXV (the beloved Gypsy Rondo) and in A Hob XVIII — plus two consecutive, early Viennese Mozart Piano Concertos in their miniature "unplugged" form. With Gary Cooper at the fortepiano, they will be the masterpiece little A Major, No 12 K414, and No 13 in C K415.

They should all sell the place out.

Booking offive: 01273 736222.


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