Last year was when the recording industry caught up with Luciano Berio – two cycles of Sequenzas (Mode and Naxos, 10/06), a disc of Sequenza “highlights” (Black Box, 12/06) and Francesco Tristano Schlimé’s comprehensive survey of his piano music (Sisyphe) tell their own story about how Berio has avoided the dip in popularity that often follows a composer’s passing.

Into this crowded field comes Italian pianist Andrea Lucchesini, Berio’s close friend and pianist of choice for his piano concerto Echoing Curves. A delightful by-product of that friendship are the two tiny four-hand pieces Touch and Canzonetta that were written as wedding presents for Lucchesini and his pianist wife Valentina Pagni, and are recorded here for the first time. As Berio was writing his Piano Sonata, Lucchesini was at the other end of a fax machine checking the viability of his demands, and being along for the birth has obviously made him bond with the piece. At its conceptual core is an intriguing dialectic between an obstinately repeating B flat and the residue of serial thinking, and the work evolves into a constructivist labyrinth bookended by these two polarities. Eventually the B flat transforms into rapid tremolos and Lucchesini’s keen ear for the culminating structure gives exhilarating inevitability that Schlimé can’t equal. The breadth of tone-colour he brings to Berio’s heavily layered textures helps orientation too – so far, the definitive recording.

This same textural clarity helps communicate a strategic dialogue between brittle attack and resonant echoes in the Sequenza, while the Webernesque Cinque Variazioni is a potent reminder of Berio’s formative interests.