Frank Millward has long been Australia’s arch-provocateur operating under the radar. By turns knotty, poetic and plaintive, this trio of sonatas for piano and, variously, violin, viola and cello, serve as reminders that he is also a composer convinced that music has a point and purpose.

The personal and the political infuse everything here, most explicitly in the disc’s titular tripartite sonata for piano and violin, Trying to Remember What I Chose to Forget. The collision informs the peristaltic surface of its acerbic opening movement, Partial Reflection, the ensuing Memoire Omissions exploring the hinterland that opens up, as Millward explains in his booklet note, “when sounds remembered are joined with those chosen to be forgotten”.

The combative dyspepsia of the concluding Tangled Tango, with Graeme Jennings’ contesting and conciliatory violin pitted against Alex Raineri’s placatory but resisting piano, speaks eloquently to wider, thornier issues, still to be resolved, outside of the recording studio and concert hall.

Alluding to distancing euphemisms employed...