Gabriel Pierné’s C minor Piano Trio Op 45, and Fauré’s in D minor Op 120 are nearly contemporary; Pierné’s trio was first performed in 1922, while the premiere of Fauré’s took place the following year, on the composer’s 78th birthday. The two belong to utterly different musical worlds, though. Pierné’s work is prolix and sometimes rambling, its three movementsbundle together a whole range of late 19th-century influences; predominantly Brahms and César Franck, but fleetingly Debussy and Ravel too. Fauré’s trio is one of his final masterpieces, composed alongside the last of his piano Nocturnes and the String Quartet, and manages to pack more musical content into 17 minutes than his compatriot manages in more than twice as long. Yet in many ways, it’s the Trio Wanderer’s performance of the Pierné that’s the more worthwhile of the two, partly because it has been recorded less often, but more importantly because they respond more vividly to its routine invention than they do to the inflections of Fauré’s seamlessly subtle phrases. For that work, the performance in Virgin Classics survey of all of Fauré’s chamber music with strings is far more worthwhile.