The Lysander Piano Trio rightly stresses the diversity of this survey of the 21st century American piano trio, with styles and influences coming from rock (in Gilad Cohen's Around the Cauldron), extended technique (in Jennifer Higdon's voice-and-trio song cycle Love Sweet), and minimalism (in Jakub Ciupinski's The Black Mirror). The group effectively shifts gears among a variety of sounds, which is often the key to a successful program of contemporary music. However, for all the diversity, there's an interesting unity among these works, one that is underappreciated as a pervasive factor since the fall of modernism: the pieces all refer to extramusical scenes and images. Cohen's Around the Cauldron, as one might expect, depicts the Witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth in a series of delightful short scenes, including one from the perspective of the unfortunate newts (and there is another little Shakespeare scene, "Titania and Her Suite," from Sofia Belimova). Reinaldo Moya's four Ghostwritten Variations each address a different novel, from Thomas Mann to science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, and William David Cooper's An den Wasser zu Babel is something of a German Expressionist set of variations on a theme representing the psalm "By the Rivers of Babylon." An X factor in the album's favor is that all of the music was either commissioned by the Lysander Piano Trio or premiered by one or more of its members. The music was recorded in two different places that do not play very well together, but in general, this is an enjoyable and stimulating release that finds new life in a traditional chamber music genre.