As one of the six separate compositions by Hughes Dufourt on this album, written between 1994 and 2018, L’origine du monde is rightly singled out for the disc’s title as an exceptionally assured and spellbinding demonstration of Dufourt’s uncompromising creative ambitions. While there is no sign in this music of an ironic or even dismissive nod towards Darius Milhaud’s beguiling La création du monde, Dufourt is much more concerned than Milhaud with the resonances of High Art that radiate from such radically diverse sources as paintings by Courbet and Chardin, and poetry by Goethe, as well as music by Schubert and Debussy.

That Debussy is the most pervasive resonance is made clear in the very first track, Meeresstille (‘Calm Sea’), which has less to do with explicit echoes of Schubert’s Goethe setting or Mendelssohn’s concert overture than with the uneasiness of attempting to progress purposefully though a passive but alien environment – the kind of atmosphere found in some of Debussy’s piano Préludes, most obviously ‘Des pas sur la neige’ (‘Footsteps in the snow’), and the piece called Tombeau de Debussy that rounds off this programme reinforces an inheritance which Dufourt may well value more than any other. But he is not providing acts of pious homage to the particular materials signalled in the composition titles; and the concern to avoid straightforward quotes or good-humoured pastiches in his own materials creates an aura of sometimes anxious, sometimes aggressive expressiveness. This is a modernist style in which affirmation and suppression confront one another and draw the listener into a seductive web of diverse sonorities that never degenerate into the kind of soulless aridities that spectralism seeks to supplant.

While I would challenge any simplistic critical claim that the music of Webern, Boulez, Birtwistle or Lachenmann is nothing more than soullessly arid, I accept that the spectralists sound very different, and offer valid but still challenging alternatives, such as the sheer earthiness of the music inspired by Courbet’s notorious painting L’origine du monde. Yet Dufourt, like his French spectralist confrères Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail, does much more than merely negate what has previously been affirmed, and his ability to provide fresh insights into archetypal musical polarities – consonance and dissonance, symmetrical and asymmetrical forms, motivic and more abstractly textural materials – is vividly expounded in the music’s often startling sonic environments, as acoustic and quasi-electronic sound worlds merge and diverge. While Marilyn Nonken is the tirelessly resourceful pianist throughout, there are also vital contributions from the New York University Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Jonathan Haas, and a recording team who make the most of ‘the cavernous and regal Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in upstate New York’, as the booklet evocatively describes it.