There isn’t much in Hans Abrahamsen’s recent output that doesn’t owe its existence, in some form or other, to his pivotal work Schnee (‘Snow’). As well as rebooting the composer’s creativity after a stretch of writer’s block, the series of 10 canons composed during 2006 08 reconnected Abrahamsen to his first compositional objectives: to write music inexpressive yet wholly expressive, as pure as the driven snow.

Schnee is a musical resource as much as a tabula rasa. Abrahamsen fans will recognise the exhaling woodwinds of Canon 1b as the portal through which we step in the opening pages of let me tell you. That work’s successor, The Snow Queen, is basically Schnee ‘the opera’.

Those things tell you something about the fertility of the canons themselves (and Abrahamsen’s mind). Like a children’s picture book, they come in pairs, in each of which the two form mirror images of one another. As the hour-long work proceeds, the pairs get shorter – from eight minutes to one – a crystallising of the subliminal arithmetic that allows the music to unravel into silence. As in a snowflake, complex mathematics serves aesthetic beauty. Along the way, three pulseless interludes manipulate a series of fifths with detuning and overtone effects – palate cleansers within a palate cleanser.

The best way to listen to Schnee is to lie flat and let it settle on top of you (take that figuratively or literally). As John Storgårds suggests in his booklet note, you can only really start to make music with Abrahamsen’s delicate snowflakes once you’ve internalised them. The music is as demure as its creator, and ideal performances capture that same quality.

This one does. The sounds Abrahamsen craves, white and translucent across a large range of actual expression, hugely complex on the page but delectably simple to the ear, are exceptionally realised and recorded here. In Canon 1a for three strings and piano, you hear the piano’s soundboard as well as the room it is resonating through. Canon 2a – most obviously deployed in The Snow Queen – is evocatively woolly and muffled. Canon 3a throbs as if beyond human control. A deep stillness sets in with Canon 3b and Intermezzo 2.

There’s not much point analysing what’s well phrased, beautifully played and so on in a performance of Schnee; that’s not really the point (though plenty on this recording meets both descriptions). The achievement here is more fundamental: to present Schnee impeccably, but as the ‘white’ music it is, that exists with such weightless fragility that it can almost seem a fairy tale. Perhaps that’s what happens when you record Schnee in Lapland in February. Either way, it raises this recording to the level of its fine predecessor from Ensemble Recherche; probably above it, in fact.