Having done Verdi for 2010's Otello and Wagner for 2013's Parsifal, bandleader/bassist Dieter Ilg was probably faced with a stark choice: either quit breathing new experimental life into the great 19th-century classical composers or take on the greatest of them all. As you can see from the title, Mein Beethoven, he chose the latter option, and mine Beethoven's back catalogue he does for this trio disc. Ilg's investigations of the canon have a naturalness and suppleness too often missing from jazz/classical crossovers; he and his collaborators quickly have you believing that Beethoven might even have had a contemporary jazz trio in mind when he was writing some of his masterpieces. ‘The quiet and monumental moments in his ‘Ninth Symphony’, his romantic and masterfully demanding piano sonatas and their form breaks, the impetuous eruptions, rough edges and redesigns of the structure of his string quartets, and his elegant and unconventional arrangements of Irish folk songs all fascinate,’ explains Ilg. ‘They are ingenious templates for experimentation, even in the 21st century.’ The point where classical source ends and jazz reinvigoration begins is invisible throughout here, which, to say how well known some of the thematic material is, is a fairly remarkable achievement.