As Jorrit Tamminga amusingly recounts in his booklet-note, it was a chance encounter with Boulez that led to his musical partner Erik Bosgraaf making this transcription of Dialogue de l’ombre double – though not the most ambitious, surely the most enticing of Boulez’s forays into combining instruments with electronics. Some readers may recall Pascal Gallois’s expert realisation of this piece for bassoon (Stradivarius, 4/03), but Bosgraaf’s version seems altogether more authentic in its eliding the tonal properties of a melody instrument with that of the human voice which provided initial inspiration. Moreover, balance between recorders (Bosgraaf plays alto, soprano and sopranino instruments) and electronics is ideally judged, giving this music an immediacy yet also intimacy beyond that of any other recorded option.

The greater part of this disc is otherwise devoted to the Dialogues that has resulted from the duo’s ‘comprovisations’ (though in its elaboration upon salient motifs, extemporisation might be thought equally applicable). The ways in which the seven pieces ‘bleed’ into each other proves absorbing, as does Tamminga’s virtuoso manipulation of spatial ambience as an expressive backdrop within which Bosgraaf’s playing is constantly redefined. If, in the final analysis, this is music needing to be experienced in real-time (though headphones provide a plausible alternative), hearing it through the remove of speakers does not render the result much less arresting or evocative. That in itself says much for the excellence of the sound as recorded here, setting the seal on a successful artistic venture and a most worthwhile release.