Begun in 1975, six years after the composer’s release from two years’ imprisonment in South Korea, which followed his abduction from West Berlin in 1967, Isang Yun’s explicitly autobiographical Cello Concerto still burns with anger and freezes with pain – qualities searingly conveyed by Siegfried Palm in a recording made six months after he gave the concerto’s première.

Nearly three decades later, Jens-Peter Maintz reveals comparable commitment, responding with appropriate ferocity to the work’s many turbulent episodes. That this appears to be a better balanced performance than Palm’s is due in no small part to a recording which gives a much fuller sense of the complex orchestral fabric. But there are also hints, in the long slow section which contains the best music in the piece, of something more than the unrelieved despair which Palm and Zender seemed to find in it: no one should expect outright serenity in music linked to such painful experiences, but Maintz and Asbury manage to suggest a hint of aspiration, of hope. Even if nothing can be ‘recollected in tranquillity’, Yun’s deeply held political and philosophical convictions didn’t entirely exclude more positive feelings, and it’s these which the performers on Capriccio are able to convey.

The Capriccio disc also includes two earlier works. Réak (1966) established Yun’s modernist credentials in the West, and it remains impressive in its way: profoundly serious, not a world away from the early orchestral scores of Xenakis, with a powerfully dramatic climax. Harmonia, for wind instruments, harp and percussion, from 1974, is gentler and more sustained, making a well-chosen, well-performed contrast to the other works on the disc.

The Camerata CD also provides a strong contrast to the Cello Concerto. The Sonata for oboe, harp and viola (1979) is a rhapsodic depiction of an elaborate courtship ritual, distinctly episodic in form, but carried along by the remarkable virtuosity of all three performers. The 1980 recording is rather airless by present-day standards, but the subtly varied textures – unusually exuberant, I would judge, for Yun – benefit from the closeness. Anyone who admires the recent ECM disc (9/03) in which Heinz Holliger performs other works by this composer should be no less impressed with this sonata.