More than 20 years separate Mauricio Kagel's first piano trio from his last, completed in 2007, the year before his death. Yet, as these remarkable performances by Trio Imàge show, the three works very clearly inhabit the same world, one that seems to hold the whole legacy of the piano trio up to scrutiny and seek new paths through it.

As in so much of Kagel's late work, nothing is quite what it seems on the surface, as commonplace elements of tonal harmony and familiarly contoured melodies are oddly juxtaposed or placed in unlikely contexts, or suddenly refracted through a sound world whose string and piano effects go well beyond the bounds of conventional trio writing. The two movements of the third trio, lasting almost half an hour, seem to me the most extraordinary of all, using the opening four-note cell as the basis of all that follows, and ending in a fierce climax and prolonged fade. All three works are major additions to the chamber repertoire, and deserve to be far better known.