The piano trio genre seems to have inspired new generations of American composers over the past few decades, and not just judging from the eclectic brew served up on the Lysander Piano Trio’s latest release. Gilad Cohen’s Around the Cauldron comprises seven short pieces that run the gamut from a Piazzolla tango on steroids and a study in attention-getting effects to brooding, neo-Romantic lyricism and motoric fake Stravinsky. Whether or not the music runs deep, it certainly holds together. Of the four parts making up Reinaldo Moya’s Ghostwritten Variations, I’m most intrigued by the third section’s unpredictable fragmenting and shuffling of melodies and the finale’s slow, sustained string chords underneath the piano’s short bursts of rapid filigree.

Twenty-year-old Sofia Belimova’s Tatiana and Her Suite compresses a number of interesting ideas into a two-minute time span. Consequently the piece seems to conclude before it begins, so to speak, without allowing the ideas to develop. By contrast, Jakob Ciupinski’s The Black Mirror goes on a tad too long for what it has to say, notably in the over-extended climactic repeated-note phrases. However, the opening piano theme supported by string harmonics is quite haunting and cinematically evocative. William David Cooper’s An den Wassern zu Babel alternates expansive, heartfelt episodes (the wonderful solo cello-writing) with less appealing stretches of petulant, hard-hitting gestures.

Jennifer Higdon’s Love Sweet dominates the programme for consistency and substance. Its five songs are based on love poems by Amy Lowell (1874-1925). Soprano Sarah Shafer’s impassioned musicality and impeccable diction do ideal justice to Higdon’s masterful word-setting ability, while pianist Liza Stepanova assiduously integrates the composer’s inventive inside-the-piano stopped notes with her colleagues’ focused pizzicato work. In fact, all six of this release’s compositions benefit from the Lysander Trio’s finely honed ensemble values and well-characterised solo contributions, not to mention the well-balanced sound plus the inclusion of sung texts, excellent booklet notes and composer biographies.