Many 20th-century composers relished bringing borrowed materials into contact with the new modernist qualities, as a special kind of dramatic musical landscape, involving conjunction as well as confrontation, became possible. Stravinsky was the archetypal instance of a composer who worked with transcriptions and transformations of folk music as well as with allusions to precursors and contemporaries as diverse as Monteverdi, Bach, Tchaikovsky and Webern, enhancing the Stravinskian essence in the process. But the rapid evolution of electroacoustics after 1950 further enriched available resources, while rarefied yet crucial developments in musical aesthetics, coupled with the ever-increasing expertise of specialist groups such as the London Sinfonietta and Ensemble Modern, challenged composers to treat the concept of borrowing even more forensically than before. As the music of Patricia Alessandrini demonstrates, what in Stravinsky and many others had been a relatively unambiguous separation of sources from derivations now requires the suspension and even negation of found materials – an erasure that depends entirely on what appears to be absent.

Delving into the backgrounds of these five compositions reveals an immense range of sources but it is a measure of Alessandrini’s radicalism that even the most attentive listener is unlikely to catch more than fleeting hints of what those sources might be. Clues to identities provided in the titles – Alma Mahler, Henry Purcell, François Couperin, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and other composers of Requiems and Lamentations – are explored in an invaluable booklet essay by Tim Rutherford-Johnson; and with the first item, Song of Alma, the prominence in the mix of a soprano voicing aspiring ascents like those in the climactic Trio of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier contributes very explicitly to the aura of ritualised yearning and regret that the other items reimagine with unsparing concentration. There is therefore no irony to be savoured in the opposition between these splinters of Strauss’s richly consonant late romanticism in Song of Alma and the elusive remnants of a much chillier post-tonal expressionism in De profundis clamavi (hommage à Alban Berg). Here the ultimate source is the finale of Berg’s Lyric Suite, now known to be a setting of Baudelaire’s poem ‘De profundis’ in German translation, whose aura of guilt-ridden and, just possibly, self-pitying despair casts a pervasive shadow over the pieces that follow.

In not providing a more diverse selection of Alessandrini’s many compositions, this album underlines the austere parameters that result from her formidably disciplined manipulation of febrile emotions. Video recordings can help listeners to connect what they hear with what they see the players doing on stage, thereby humanising the effect of such music in live performance, and this remains the case even in music as dependent on electronic manipulation as Alessandrini’s. An audio-only disc intensifies the challenge to listeners to contemplate and appreciate the vast distance between sources and outcomes that Rutherford-Johnson’s annotations outline. As with some of the more ambitious and arresting works by major late-modernist composers such as Luigi Nono and Helmut Lachenmann, it is also useful to explore the philosophical and political convictions that underpin the music’s often evanescent migrations between sound and noise.

There is little sense here of the fervent Schoenbergian evocation of ‘air from other planets’. The air is that of planet Earth, with all its contemporary vulnerability, and only in the piece called Nachtgewächse – a reference to Schoenberg’s Maeterlinck setting Herzgewächse – are there hints of a calmer, more detached spirit. Such qualities are decisively dissipated in the final piece, Leçons de ténèbres. Apart from the historical sacred sources, it’s possible to sense a more immediate affinity with the ritualised repetitions of Harrison Birtwistle’s setting of Paul Celan’s haunting poem ‘Tenebrae’. Accidental or intentional? Either way, it is undeniable that, technically, these Alessandrini recordings are supremely well crafted, and the performances radiate a dedicated concern to do the music justice.