One of Berio’s last works, the 28-minute Piano Sonata is also one of his most powerful. It might seem pretentious to say that the music sounds like a battle between the instinct to survive, to assert continuity, and the forces of darkness and destruction ranged against it. But this sonata is very much the consequence of Berio’s earlier operas and music dramas, and the way it tackles a potentially banal idea – repetitions and recurrences of a single note, B flat, placed within an elaborate and richly imaginative framework of struggle and opposition – is as fresh and absorbing as anything in his output.

Here the sonata is placed in the context of Berio’s five earlier solo piano works, from the derivative but tightly organised Petite Suite of 1947 onwards. At 26, Francesco Tristano Schlimé, playing a Yamaha, has abundant technical facility and full measure of the music’s expressive range. In both Sequenza IV and Rounds (originally a kind of short “sequenza” for harpsichord) I found his approach a bit over-emphatic for such vivid and precisely formulated music, but he never falls into the kind of mechanical score-reading mode one sometimes hears in performances of Berio: and the recording – rather close in focus but not cutting back on the Yamaha’s resonance – is also exemplary. As often these days, the annotation in the booklet is not as helpful as it might be, and nowhere are the poetic and highly informative titles of the Six Encores provided.