SALZBURG, Austria – Taking a turn in the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum was the Wanderer Trio. These are three Frenchmen, Vincent Coq (piano), Jean-Marc Phillips-Varjabedian (violin – and that’s an extraordinary name), and Raphael Pidoux (cello). Why “the Wanderer”? Well, as their bio explains, they wanted “to honor Schubert [who wrote more than one piece called “Wanderer”], to affirm their relationship with the German Romantics, and to point up the itinerant life of the musician.” Well done, I would say.

They can play, too. For their Salzburg program, they chose two works conspicuously incorporating folk idioms, and then one of the greatest works in the trio literature, and in the chamber literature, and in all of music.

To begin was Dvoyrak’s Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor, Op. 90. (The Salzburg Festival is going hog-wild on Dvoyrak this year, because Dvo yrak died in 1904, and you know what that means: anniversary, anniversary, anniversary.) The Trio Op. 90 is subtitled “Dumky,” which is to say “dumkas,” which is to say a series of a certain Slavic dance. The work is rhapsodic, involving the usual imaginative Dvoyrakian harmonics.

The Wanderer Trio played with great freedom, as befitted the work, but they also stayed within musical bounds. They were dancy and folky, yet disciplined. They were neither stiff nor sloppy. Their tempos were sensible, their rubato was sensible – pretty much everything was sensible. Furthermore, they played as a unit. Each proved a decent (at least) player on his own, yet the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.

Mr. Coq, at the piano, was somewhat brittle, but he handled beautifully what appear, from Dvorak, to be bird calls. The violinist, Mr. Phillips-Varjabedian, was a little stolid, but game. Most impressive – certainly in the Dvoyrak – was the cellist, Mr. Pidoux. He played stylishly, in addition to offering an attractive tone.

As for the work, it is a splendid example of the merger of folk with classical, though Dvoyrak may indulge in a dumka too many.

Next on the program was a piece by Copland: his “Vitebsk, a Study on Jewish Themes for Piano, Violin, and Cello.” As Herbert Glass said in his program notes, this is the only work – as far as we can figure out – “for which Copland drew on his Jewish roots.”

Stylistically, “Vitebsk” is a far cry from “Appalachian Spring.” A 1928 work, it is dissonant and rough. It has the feel of a study, too, although it is of course performable. Mr. Coq was thornily modernist, which was right. Copland gives the strings folk tunes while the piano counters with the new. The Wanderer Trio played with surprising intensity – indeed, they were wound up tight, Bartokian, in a way. Mr. Pidoux, on his cello, closed the piece with a beautiful tapering – a long diminuendo.

And that masterpiece, to which we were treated after intermission? Brahms’s Piano Trio No. 1 in B major, Op. 8. Don’t be fooled by the early opus number: Brahms revised the work in old age. In fact, he substantially rewrote it. The result was a nearly perfect piece of music: inspired, youthful, polished, wise.

In the first movement – Allegro con brio – the Wanderer made each line clear, and sometimes emphatically so. They played with appropriate fullness, cresting, churning, striving, grinning, wowing – that’s what the work does. Pervading it is a Romantic nobility, and the Wanderer reflected that, too.

The second movement, the Scherzo, could have been fleeter and more precise. But it was sincere, and sort of touching in its sturdiness. The third movement, the Adagio, was not a success: It was so slow as to forfeit momentum, and indeed it became ponderous. Attention wandered (went a-Wanderer-ing?). The Finale is a stewing, horizontal thing, in a surprising minor key. Our trio’s dynamics could have been subtler, and they could have exhibited more refinement on the whole. They were a little rough (as they had been in the Copland – with more justice). But that was better than timidity or effeteness. The players roared to Brahms’s B-minor ending.

And the audience in the Grosser Saal roared for them. They responded with two encores: a Schubert nocturne, which, unfortunately, is a bland piece of music, which the Wanderer Trio played indifferently. And then a Haydn presto, Hungarian style, in which the three were spirited – not flawless, not exemplary, but spirited. They had brought an appealing program, and executed it well.