In a century not short of musical revolutions, the appearance of Ligeti's Horn Trio in 1982 was one of the more quietly subversive moments. In a single half-hour piece Ligeti presented his new artistic manifesto, inventing a musical world that implicitly rejected most of the avant garde trappings of his earlier music, and reasserted the power of tonality. Yet there is no sense of experimentation about the trio, never a hint that Ligeti is still coming to terms with the possibilities of his new musical language. Everything about it is fully achieved, and its harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary would be the foundation of all Ligeti's music for the final two decades of his creative life.

The trio is intriguingly subtitled "Homage to Brahms". And, though there is nothing nostalgic or anecdotal about Ligeti's music, it's still fascinating to hear it programmed alongside Brahms's own Horn Trio Op 40, as it was in this recital by three members of Endymion - horn player Stephen Stirling, violinist Krysia Osostowicz and pianist Michael Dussek. The two works follow four-movement plans, and a mood of melancholy pervades both. Ligeti's final adagio is a lament that eventually evaporates in ominous bass notes and fragmentary themes; Brahms places his great emotional outpouring third, before the bucolic finale. Both are haunted, too, by the sound of the natural horn, for which Brahms originally wrote his work (though Stirling sensibly played it on a modern valved instrument), and whose harmonics give a special tang to Ligeti's harmonies.

The Endymion performances had a wonderful assurance about them, technical and musical, as if pairing these two distinctive masterpieces was the most natural thing in the world. Osostowicz and Dussek had begun the recital with a forthright account of Beethoven's first violin sonata, Op 12 No 1, but it was the two trios that brought the very best out of all involved.