This release includes the sixth (at least) recording of Vasks’s Episodi e Canto perpetuo but it’s still arguably the least familiar piece here. The composer modelled his piano trio’s shape on that of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time but it’s impossible not to hear an act of homage in the harmonic (and unison) sounds of the work too – a psychedelic, diabolical, bejewelled journey through life’s trials to the reassurance of love featuring a battered old piano. In the movement titled ‘Canto perpetuo’ the violin sings an ecstatic but strained song (violinist Eva Bindere’s tight vibrato is so effective here) before the others join her in an embrace that borders on the suffocating. Transition into the coda is magical, Vasks emerging from Messiaen’s influence as himself.

The other works are key pieces in Vasks’s output and focused examples of his pain-lined aesthetic – the dual nightmares of oppression and a world gone mad as the dark antithesis to the beauty of nature, the promise of faith and a belief in forgiveness and love. Lonely Angel is a straight transcription of the fifth movement of the composer’s String Quartet No 4, in which it represents the latter qualities with mirroring string incantations around a steady, shimmering piano with signature Vasks parallel harmonies and harmonic tension pushing the soaring melody on and on. The performance from these Latvian musicians is as soulful as could be imagined.

That Vasks’s well-delineated music is ripe for re voicing is further in evidence from his own trio version of the instrumental/choral work Plainscapes, in which he imagined a musical picture of Zemgale in the south of Latvia where ‘you can see the starry sky extend right down to the horizon’. Again the three instruments are as characters in this work, which is as much a dramatic three-hander as a broad landscape. And again, the performance – with exquisite gradations of vibrato from the two strings – is invested with rare space, profundity and a sense of deep personal need. Most Vasks discs are worth hearing but this one is a cut above.