The death of Wolfgang Rihm last July will hopefully bring him into greater focus. If his diverse output rejects easy appreciation, there could hardly be a better introduction than the pieces heard here.

Many of Rihm’s works evolve as composites of an initial idea, with Fremde Szenen (1982 84) no exception – these ‘Strange Scenes’ envisaging the piano trio, more specifically Schumann’s contribution to it, from a vantage decisively but not inflexibly of their present. Thus, Fremde Szene I outlines without ever quite becoming a sonata form movement as would be expected in a work from the Romantic era; one that Fremde Szene II duly reinterprets as an exposition, its relatively extended discourse amounting to an intensive and cumulative development as much of the underlying concept as of actual content. Afterwards, Fremde Szene III feels less a reprise than an extended coda, even a postlude, to a sequence that does not so much conclude as gradually move towards a stasis more ‘final’ than any self-conscious resolution could be.

As pendant, Antlitz (1992) proves entirely appropriate. Inspired by the Austrian artist Kurt Kocherscheidt, this ‘drawing’ brings violin and piano into an oblique while decidedly wary interaction, from out of which any tangible ‘Countenance’ can be no more than glimpsed.

This latter piece is equally well realised by Tianwa Yang and Nicholas Rimmer on a volume of Rihm’s violin-and-piano music. The Beethoven Trio Ravensburg offer a more impulsive and refractory account of Fremde Szenen but this finely recorded newcomer by Arditti, Pirisi and Pandolfi is a first choice, even if the Boulanger Trio’s placing its initial ‘scene’ alongside piano trios from Robert and Clara Schumann might well have been Rihm’s preferred context.