Mauricio Kagel has long been among music’s prime subversives: a composer who pays homage to the past by creatively – that is, positively – debunking it. The present disc gathers together several of the short chamber pieces which figure prominently in his output, and from a 15-year span either side of Kagel the Modernist and Kagel the reconstituted Classicist, who both go unrepresented here.

As to what is included, the Ludwig Van music was written for a film ‘commemorating’ Beethoven’s bicentenary in 1970; its examination of museum – even mausoleum! – tendencies and consumerist ethics make it prescient of a later era. Shorn of such visuals as depict the Bonn ‘walkabout’ and (literally) disintegrating pianist, the nine short pieces here focus on the more intimate issue of the composer’s deafness, and the spatial and aural imbalances which might result. Numerous allusions to Beethoven’s music flit past as the ensemble struggles to find foreground coherence, the culmination being the collapse around the ‘Ode to Joy’. Abrasively sardonic it may be, but with an underlying pathos which in itself is commendably thought-provoking.

If the remaining pieces are less explicit in their cultural references, the conflict between hearing and perception is still an intriguing one. Unguis incarnatus est (1972) conflates piano-pedalling with the reductive tendencies of late Liszt. MM51 (1976) examines the relationship between piano, vocalising pianist and metronome from the perspective of Expressionist film (a link made explicit in the later MM51 Nosferatu). Der Eid des HippokratesRrrrrrr transcriptions (1981) are from a larger collection dealing with musical things ‘r’ – including a Messiaenic ‘Ra¯ga’, a chromatically-sabotaged ‘Ragtime-Waltz’, and a ‘Rossignols enrhumés’ whose prepared-piano bird makes Stravinsky’s mechanical nightingale sound a very poetic specimen.

Attentive performances from Alexandre Tharaud and associated musicians, set in a pleasantly spacious acoustic. Classy packaging too: though – as translated – the booklet notes, particularly the introductory article, make Kagel’s music sound much more abstruse than it actually is!