Fast approaching its centenary, the Donaueschinger Musiktage continues as a beacon for European music of what might still be called the avant-garde variety. Not that such a term need equate with stylistic exclusivity, as this well-filled set of world premieres confirms.

London-born and resident in Berlin, Rebecca Saunders is among the most distinctive voices of her generation, as Skin potently underlines. Inspired by Beckett and quoting Joyce, this 25-minute piece unfolds as a scena with antecedents in Berio and Kagel – building to a visceral climax then subsiding into a stillness both mesmeric and affecting, with Juliet Fraser fearless in a vocal part she helped to create. The other pieces on this disc are less engrossing, though Bernhard Gander draws a lively response from keyboards, guitars and percussion to the fore in Cold Cadaver with Thirteen Scary Scars, its morphed take on jazz-rock making space for a fatalistic citing of Beethoven during its wayward course; whereas Martin Smolka’s a yell with misprints elides textural stridency with ambient calm to lively if unmemorable effect.

The second disc begins with a major work from James Dillon, The Gates, combining string quartet and orchestra for a dialogue whose premise of ‘passing through’ inspires music of textural intricacy and harmonic translucency such as effortlessly sustains its half-hour span. If only Franck Bedrossian’s Twist yielded comparable substance, but its blustery interplay of orchestra and electronics hardly evinces that radical new timbral fusion of which he speaks. Its title that of the earliest known Andean settlement, Martin Jaggi’s Caral evokes this music from prehistory with evident resource – not least in the subtle microtonal writing for flutes; something that Georg Friedrich Haas has eschewed in the plangent modal harmonies of his Trombone Concerto, against which the soloist unfolds an elegiac and searching monologue.

The detailed and spacious SACD sound and succinctly informative booklet notes are fully in keeping with previous Neos releases from this source. Both the Dillon and Haas works were inspired by the death of Armin Köhler (1952-2014), whose near quarter-century stewardship of the Donaueschingen Festival placed composers, musicians and listeners alike in his debt.