‘A triptych: three images, three perspectives of transfigured nights’ is how Barbara Hannigan describes her second collaboration with the Ludwig Orchestra. As with its predecessor, ‘Crazy Girl Crazy’ (9/17), she takes on the dual role of singer and conductor; but whereas the first recording, placing Berg and Berio alongside Gershwin, had its moments of unwieldiness both in programming and execution, things here are at once more cogent and infinitely more assured, as Hannigan guides us through three contrasting dark nights of the soul. Haydn’s La Passione Symphony, with its grieving, obsessive refusal to deviate from F minor, is flanked by Nono’s Djamila Boupachà for solo soprano, commemorating the Algerian militant whose determination to speak out against French atrocities radically shifted public opinion during the Algerian War, and by the unsparing confrontation with mortality of Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, retroactively haunted by its composer’s sudden death shortly after completing the score.

The disc is not without its idiosyncrasies, though, particularly with regard to the Haydn, where Hannigan provocatively divorces harpsichordist Tineke Steenbrink from her traditional continuo role and asks her to ‘stumble and fumble in the darkness, on a different path from the strings’, representing ‘the dark, lost angel’ in ‘an Underworld and Our World’. There’s a slight inconsistency here, as Steenbrink reverts to playing continuo in the second movement and is silent in the last two, but the effect of her improvisation round the repeats of the opening Adagio, deliberately pulling their harmonies and melodic contours out of shape, is unquestionably dislocating and unsettling in a performance that otherwise suggests the grandeur of a solemn, formal ritual. You will either like it or you won’t.

Elsewhere, however, we are on firmer ground. Describing Djamila Boupachà as ‘modern bel canto’, and thereby effectively anchoring it in traditions of Italian lyricism, Hannigan sings it with remarkable beauty and tonal lustre. The sense of detached bifurcation between singing and conducting, meanwhile, that hampered the Lulu Suite on the earlier disc, vanishes here with Quatre chants, where the overriding impression is of Hannigan leading a chamber ensemble rather than exerting control over it. This is an exceptional performance of one of the greatest, if most troubling works of the late 20th century, beautifully articulated throughout, with every vocal inflection and shift in instrumental colour quite wonderfully realised, and the precarious mix of reflection, terror and exhausted acceptance quite vividly realised. The instrumental sound is darker and warmer than on Sylvain Cambreling’s 2002 Klangforum Wien recording (Kairos, 1/02), while Hannigan, probing the meaning of every single phrase, is a more overtly committed protagonist than Cambreling’s rather hieratic Catherine Dubosc. You might find yourself in two minds about Hannigan’s Haydn but her Quatre chants is truly outstanding.