Five Aphorisms (1990) find Alfred Schnittke drawing on that sparse and refracted idiom that came to the fore with the bleak soundscapes from his final decade, in which his polystylistic approach of allusion and quotation is replaced by an altogether more austere and fragmented means of expression – with the gaunt chorale of the final piece offering the most tenuous of resolutions. Gourari has their measure, as she does that of Diary (2002), in which Rodion Shchedrin addresses the ‘bagatelle’ genre with resourcefulness and no little subtlety, avoiding the tendency to style-hopping often found in his music. Even more unified stylistically is the Zwiesprache (1999) of Wolfgang Rihm, though this was no doubt occasioned by the concept underlying these five pieces – each of them an ‘in memoriam’ to a colleague who died during the year in question, and making for a sequence unified yet also varied in its elegiac manner.

Gourari is a lucid guide to this music, as also the winsome adaptations from theatre and film scores by Giya Kancheli, ‘get well’ variations by Arvo Pärt that crystallise his re-embrace of tonality, and slow movements from Bach’s concertos after Vivaldi and Alessandro Marcello that bookend the recital with unerring pathos. Certainly those who recall Gourari’s insinuating presence in Werner Herzog’s film Invincible should find this latest disc hardly less enticing.