SOMETIMES you hear music you know well as if for the first time.

This happened on March 19th at the West Somerset Community College in Minehead when the Japanese Fujita Piano Trio truly “re-created” music for violin, cello and piano by Haydn, Beethoven and Arensky .

The conversational opening of the Andante of Joseph Haydn’s “Gypsy Rondo” Trio in G seemed at once the expression of a lifetime’s empathy between these three sisters, here made easier by their playing by memory.

Tactful pianistic precision on an appropriately chamber-sized instrument made possible some delicious pianissimo playing from the strings and the effortless emergence of the exquisite string melody in the Poco adagio. The Rondo finale in Gypsy Hungarian style provided a feast of varied style, tone colour and speed.

Fireworks followed in a surprisingly little-played work by Anton Arensky (Op 32 in D minor) from the other end of the 19th Century.

Though unmistakeably Russian, the sweeping phrases and rippling piano of the opening Allegro suggested Mendelssohn dressed as Dvorak. String tremolos and harmonics recalled Ravel, whereas in the Trio of the Scherzo, there was just an attractive sniff of night club sleaze.

Here a momentary memory lapse was all but concealed, and the reprise of the Scherzo itself was a faultless showcase of pizzicato, trills, spiccato bowings on strings, and bell effects, drum rolls, cadenzas and triplet cascades on piano – an almost orchestral range of colour, not altogether surprising from a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, the master of romantic orchestration.

The climax of the evening was The “Archduke”, one of the two great Beethoven piano trios, the other being the “Ghost”. Composed as his deafness rapidly increased, it was the last work in which the composer himself appeared as pianist and he is reputed to have hammered unmercifully. This was not the case with the Fujitas. The heart of this work is the third (Andante cantabile) movement in which a theme of measured solemnity is transformed through four variations into a magical reworking of the original theme that breaks with an explosive snap into the finale. The whole process was movingly and imaginatively handled.

The Fujitas’ encore was the most supple reading I have heard of the Allegretto from the first of three triple sets of pieces by the early 20th C English composer Frank Bridge – a minor masterpiece of simplicity.

Five years ago these talented sisters had last delighted a Minehead audience. Earlier in the day, thanks to the West Somerset Arts Society, they entertained one hundred school children at the West Somerset Community College - building audiences for the future.