Stanze, a sequence of five songs for baritone, male chorus and orchestra, was Berio’s last completed work, premiered after his death in 2003. Though the title is Italian – and means ‘rooms’, not ‘verses’, indicating the distinct character of each individual movement – only the texts for movements two and three are in that language. The third movement sets an English version of a whimsical poem by Alfred Brendel and the outer movements are both to German texts – the first Paul Celan’s Tenebrae, the last translated from the Hebrew of Dan Pagis.

The movements are indeed diverse and it could be that, after hearing them, Berio would have had second thoughts, if not about the order then about some details of the balance between voice and orchestra. Even the admirable Dietrich Henschel has difficulty adhering to the dynamics as marked in the score – perhaps he should have been more forwardly balanced. But this is a live recording of the premiere. Given the work’s importance, it’s a pity that it couldn’t have been taken into the studio and worked on more intensively. Yet this Ondine release captures the emotional power of a special occasion, all five movements coloured by the brooding atmosphere established at the outset in Celan’s great threnody.

Christoph Eschenbach has recorded Rendering before and although his new reading of Berio’s idiosyncratic filling-out of the sketches for Schubert’s Tenth Symphony is excellent in its way, it seems a pity that a different and more substantial orchestral work, not otherwise available, couldn’t have been included instead. Berio’s own characterful recording of Rendering is on a disc whose main item is his gripping piano concerto Echoing Curves but the best place for Rendering is probably on a disc like Jonathan Nott’s recent compilation of music associated with Schubert, or Riccardo Chailly’s new collection of Berio transcriptions.

In Rendering, Chailly is more dramatic than Eschenbach, and recorded more resonantly, but there’s a case for understatement in this music anyway. I enjoyed the short items in Chailly’s programme most: the sparkling Purcell concoction, a tribute to Berio’s publisher Dr Alfred A Kalmus, and the early Mozart Variations in which, refreshingly, it’s impossible to detect a single phrase of Mozart’s original. I don’t warm to Berio’s perfectly respectable, and respectful, orchestration of the Brahms F minor Clarinet Sonata but it’s well done here.

Finally, DG has paired the Sinfonia (1968) with Berio’s last purely orchestral score, Ekphrasis (Continuo II), completed nearly 30 years later. The term ‘ekphrasis’ indicates verbal reflections on visual phenomena and the work is an absorbing exploration of the idea of commentary – on Berio’s earlier orchestral piece Continuo I and on the whole relation between music and architecture, their shared responses to space and density. Ekphrasis may be less fractured and febrile than Sinfonia but the intense, unstable continuities it unfolds require, and reward, close listening. It’s a tremendous piece, superbly performed by Peter Eötvös and the Gothenburg orchestra. Sinfonia is well done, too, although I now find the central movement – a Mahler song contending with the entire history of music as well as words by Samuel Beckett – of less enduring interest than the more focused turbulence of the outer movements. Yet Eötvös is successful in conveying a strong sense of cohesion and consistent tension in the work as a whole. Overall, this DG disc complements Chailly’s longstanding (and still impressive) account of Sinfonia, effectively coupled as that is with Formazioni and the 11 Folk Songs.