Florestan Trio, Wigmore Hall, London

In the few years since their formation, the Florestan Trio – Susan Tomes, piano; Anthony Marwood, violin; and Richard Lester, cello – have received such consistent praise for their performances and discs that one almost trembles lest the reality prove more mundane. Yet within seconds of the start of the Adagio introduction of Beethoven's Piano Trio in G major Op 1 No 2, their quality was reaffirmed. Marwood spontaneously responded to Tomes's pellucid invocations, every phrase alive with insight and sentiment. The entire performance brought home once again how strikingly new in its range of expression and pressure of invention this early masterpiece must have sounded in the 1790s.

Neither of the other works could be called standard repertoire, though Alexander Goehr's relatively early piano Trio Op 20 (1966) would surely have become such long ago were its polymetric notation – as Tomes said in her introduction – not so demanding. It is a striking conception: a variation-form first movement, full of cubistic cross-cuttings and fiercely folkloristic cut-and-thrust, balanced against an immensely slow, remote aria-like finale in which Lester's delivery of the arch-like inaugural cello phrases was quite transfixing in its still intensity. As the work is currently unavailable on disc, one can only hopes that Hyperion, to whom the Florestans are contracted, can be persuaded to capture what proved a near-definitive interpretation.

The second half was given over to Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio in A minor Op 50 – a sprawling 45-minute structure ostensibly in two vast movements, of spotty reputation and rarely given without discreet cutting of supposedly less inspired passages. Even the Florestans took a slice out of the sonata-form finale of the second movement variations, but they threw themselves into the rest of the work as if they really believed in it.

Tchaikovsky confessed that he undertook the Trio as an exercise in making something of an instrumental combination he did not care for, and he tends to rely in his stormy first movement on string lines of immense length riding upon torrential surges of piano figuration. These, however, the Florestans gave balance, grade and span, with a spacious urgency that was thrilling, while seizing every whimsical and colourful opportunity offered by the more disparate character-variations of the second movement. And as the finale wound majestically down to its final funeral march reprise of the work's opening melody, one had, at least in this performance, the sense of a major statement redeemed.