Buy this for Beethoven’s beguiling arrangements of British folk songs

Beethoven was proud of his Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello, Piano, pointing out that no one else had attempted such an experiment. He was writing at the height of his youthful powers and the work is stuffed with earworms. Yet I can’t think of any later composers who copied that particular model, and you can’t blame them. This is essentially a concerto for piano trio and full orchestra – not an easy combination, because the soloists keep having to pass the baton to each other while bracing themselves for the next orchestral tutti.

Nicola Benedetti, Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Benjamin Grosvenor make a really good job of it; Kanneh-Mason’s cello glows as memorably as it did in his Elgar Cello Concerto. But they don’t quite manage the miraculous give-and-take of Gil Shaham, Anne Gastinel and the late Nicholas Angelich, whose bouncy precision almost erases any doubts about the wisdom of Beethoven’s experiment. Likewise, in the polonaise finale Santtu-Matias Rouvali’s Philharmonia doesn’t lift its skirts as high as Paavo Jarvi and his Frankfurt Radio forces.

Even so, you need this album because the filler consists of Gerald Finley singing eight Scottish, Welsh and Irish folk songs arranged by Beethoven with beguiling skill for soloist and piano trio. The composer wrote no fewer than 179 of these ‘recompositions’, as Tom Service aptly describes them in his notes – ‘a gigantic body of music, and far less appreciated than it should be’. I couldn’t agree more, but Decca obviously hasn’t got the message because it inexplicably omits any mention of Finley or the songs from the front cover.