The third volume in this complete Beethoven piano trio cycle offers a rare opportunity to hear the composer’s piano trio arrangement of his Second Symphony. The young man had found a welcome and a home in the house of Prince Carl Lichnowsky, and it was while there that his first three trios were published in 1795—when the composer was twenty-five—and dedicated to the Prince. Whether this third trio was composed earlier or around that time is unclear, but the earlier ones more probably came from teenage years. It is certainly full of highly attractive melodic invention, and has rightfully taken its place among the most popular works in the chamber repertoire. Seven years later he had completed the Second Symphony, also dedicated to the Prince, and it showed how quickly Beethoven’s vision of music was expanding into new realms. At that time he was looking for ways to increase his income, which was probably the reason he made this trio arrangement. Beethoven inherited the convention of placing the violin and piano at much the same level of importance with the cello’s role reduced to underpinning them. He was to change that in the future, but it was still the case in the C minor trio, and even more so in the symphony arrangement. That was a transcription any competent musician could have made, the content a literal view of the symphony devoid of any effort to recreate orchestral colours. As a filler we have the short and very early Allegretto unpublished in his lifetime. Nina Tichman’s piano playing is a tower of strength, and mercurial when needed. Violinist, Ida Bieler and Maria Kliegel’s cello are good, but unlike their earlier recordings, the engineers have set the piano well to the fore and without compromising the clarity of the trio in tutti passages.