One of Britain’s leading composers and educators of his day, Stanford considered chamber music an essential representation of ‘absolute music’. His mastery of extended instrumental forms truly comes of age in the First Piano Quartet, a work which breathes a confidence and fluency to rival Brahms. An adventurous harmonic palette distinguishes the Second Piano Trio, the Beethovenian pathos of its slow movement contrasting with the defiant turbulence of its cyclically related outer movements. The Gould Trio is ‘magnificently stylish’ (Gramophone) in their recording of Stanford’s First Piano Trio (8.572452).