Nyman Piano Trios by the Fidelio Trio

Michael Nyman has spent decades being misunderstood. The minimalist tag got stuck on him early — courtesy of his own 1974 book on the subject, which named the thing he’d later be accused of flogging to death — and it never quite came unstuck, even as his music grew more complex, more emotionally direct, more willing to wear its heart on its sleeve. These four piano trios, gathered across nearly two decades of work, offer something like a corrective. They don’t sound like Philip Glass. They don’t sound like Steve Reich. They sound, stubbornly and unmistakably, like Nyman.

The Fidelio Trio — violinist Darragh Morgan, cellist Adi Tal, pianist Mary Dullea — are ideal advocates. Dullea in particular has the rhythmic iron you need for this music, the capacity to drive an ostinato without turning it mechanical, to make repetition feel like insistence rather than laziness. Morgan’s intonation holds up under considerable pressure.

Start, if you can bear to break chronology, with Time Will Pronounce, the earliest work and the most nakedly felt. Nyman wrote it in 1992, the Bosnian war already well underway, and took his title from Joseph Brodsky — a poet who knew something about the relationship between political catastrophe and language stripped to its essentials. This is Nyman operating at a pitch of emotional urgency that his film scores, brilliant as many of them are, rarely sustained. The string players are asked for genuine tonal weight here, for vibrato deployed not as decoration but as expressive necessity, and the Fidelio players respond. The driving motoric passages — those churning, repetitive figures that Nyman inherited from the English virginalists and baptized in rock and roll — generate a kind of anguish that I can only call Nymanesque Boogie, which sounds flip but isn’t. The work ends in something close to exhausted silence. Passion spent.

The Photography of Chance is the longest work on the disc and, to my ear, the most immediately appealing. Commissioned out of Salt Lake City in 2004, it draws on the call of the Sora bird — a marshland species, reedy and insistent — and Nyman weaves that ornithological material into the melodic fabric with a naturalness that keeps surprising you. The cello runs jazz-adjacent lines that sometimes operate in a different emotional world from what the violin and piano are doing above them, and the conjunctions between sections arrive with the abruptness of a door slamming. There are moments — a barn-dance figure that bubbles up from nowhere, something that might have wandered in from a Copland score left out in the rain — where you catch hints of American vernacular that Nyman, a Londoner to his bones, deploys with the affectionate distance of an outsider. One senses, too, the ghost of his score for The Piano, that capacity for melody that aches without sentimentalizing.

Poczatek, the newest work, derives from film music Nyman wrote in 2009 and then reworked for these players — who had already recorded it by the time they premièred it, which is either a model of efficiency or an amusing reversal of the usual order of things. Its five movements range from driving to stately, the rhythmic patterns clicking into place with the satisfying inevitability of well-cut gears. It’s the most extroverted piece here.

Yellow Beach is, by Nyman’s own admission, a “transfigured version” of music the Michael Nyman Band played in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books — that strange, gorgeous, sometimes exhausting film that gave Nyman some of his most characteristic moments. At six minutes it moves quickly from one incident to the next, and the transfiguration works. But it’s the lightest thing here, frankly. Non-essential Nyman, as opposed to the real thing.

The sound is clean and present, the booklet notes written by the composer himself with characteristic directness. This is the first installment in what promises to be a substantial series on Nyman’s own label — a composer, in other words, betting on himself. On the evidence here, the bet is sound.