Naxos’s previous release of music by clarinettist-composer Derek Bermel (b1967), ‘Migrations’ (A/19), impressed me with its varied, colourful demeanour, bracing eclecticism and ‘Bernsteinian élan’. This follow-up album carries on where ‘Migrations’ left off but is also more challenging to the ear with its pared-down chamber textures. The same whimsical humour recurs, too, but sitting cheek-by-jowl with more astringent elements. The effect overall is vivid and bright, the aural equivalent of splashing one’s face with ice-cold water.

Not that there is anything cold about Bermel’s music. In ‘Harmonica’, the first movement of the album’s title-work, Intonations (2016, ‘inspired in part’ by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man), the string quartet raises a smile in emulating the sound of the tiny mouth organ. Throughout this engaging triptych, the sound of the blues is dominant, in the central ‘Homily’ descending to near-unbearable anguish ahead of the more boisterous finale, ‘Hustle’, which incorporates some unusual instrumental effects, including a stopped glissando Bermel terms the ‘windshield wiper’. The clarinet quintet A Short History of the Universe (as related by Nima Arkani-Hamed) (2013) takes as its starting point the lectures on time and gravity by the eponymous physicist. The textures here, however, are more multilayered, raucous in the opening ‘Multiverse’, boisterous in the finale, ‘Twistor Scattering’, the tone painting – for instance in the central ‘Heart of Space’ – more complex.

Between these triptychs lie three highly varied works. The (mostly) euphonious Ritornello (2011) was commissioned by the Albany Symphony but is given here in an atmospheric reduction for electric guitar – evocatively played by Wiek Hijmans – and quartet. Bermel himself plays the vibrant set of unaccompanied Thracian Sketches (2003), taking Bulgarian folk idioms as its starting point before ranging further afield, invigoratingly. Christopher Otto, leader of the Jack Quartet, is on his mettle in the five Violin Études (2009-16), the component movements written variously for Jennifer Koh and Midori, some pointing towards A Short History. The performances are committed and virtuoso, though Naxos’s sound is a little fierce. Recommended, nonetheless, for a musical voice beyond the run of the mill.