The idea of putting pieces by Mauricio Kagel and Alfred Schnittke on the same disc at first seemed unlikely, but having heard the evidence the ‘ayes’ indeed have it. Kagel, an Argentine-born, Cologne-based avant-gardist with a healthy sense of humour, and Schnittke, depressive polystylist born of the Soviet regime, ought to have little in common. But both men produce music that layers a potent sense of irony against their dialectical relationship with classical tradition.

Both, too, had their various experiences of post-Schoenbergian serialism, and it’s on Kagel’s music that the constructivism of the Darmstadt avant-garde has left the most powerful legacy. His First Piano Trio (1985) is Schubertian in gesture but in little else. He deconstructs the syntax of classical procedure so that cadences and modulations no longer function, as though he’s setting the material against itself. The Liszt Trio make cogent sense of it all, keeping a cool detachment that adds to the psychological chill.

Kagel completed his Second Trio on September 11, 2001, simply abandoning the piece mid-phrase when he heard the tragic news coming from New York. The Schoenberg Ensemble’s account (Winter & Winter, 3/03) is more obviously ‘maverick’ than this new one but both approaches have much to commend them.

The disc concludes with the piano trio arrangement of Schnittke’s 1985 String Trio. Compared to Kagel’s subversive unpicking of protocol, Schnittke’s clashes of intense chromaticism against jaunty tonality feel like an ‘effect’. But there’s real synergy flowing between the works, and the Liszt Trio hold nothing back.