BMC continues to put us in its debt with its coverage of Peter Eötvös – who, over the past decade, has emerged as a composer of real individuality. These discs focus on different periods of his music, and make for appreciably different listening. If the first disc illustrates the experimental side of Eötvös’s composing from the mid-1970s, neither work is provisional in the sense of being under-achieved – though, in both instances, a lengthy revision process may account for this.

Intervalles-Intérieurs is Eötvös’s most thorough exploration of the substance of sound. Its alternative title, ‘Inside the Intervals’, suggests music along the lines of pioneering ‘spectral’ compositions by Gérard Grisey or the early work of Kaija Saariaho. In fact, the piece is a subtly evolving dialogue between an instrumental quintet (cowbells accorded equal significance with wind and strings) and a tape part which both anticipates and elaborates on the intervals from which emerge the work’s rhythms and melodies. The tape has parallels with the ambient music of such diverse figures as Alvin Lucier and Brian Eno – though Eötvös’s varying of musical motion and concern for overall continuity are his alone.

Similar qualities pervade Windsequenzen – except that here the eight individual movements embody the ‘calm in motion, motion in calm’ paradox of Zen Buddhism with a vein of wistfulness more akin to contemporary Morton Feldman. Sensual and meditative by turns, these works chart a fascinating early stage in Eötvös’s composing.

A relevant stage, too, as can be heard on the disc of works from the past four years – above all in Jet Stream, whose relationship between trumpet and orchestra Eötvös describes as akin to an individual going in the opposite direction to a Japanese crowd in a one-way street. There’s a virtuoso role for trumpeter Markus Stockhausen, yet it is the richly translucent orchestral writing – continuing the vein of zeroPoints and Replica (the last on ECM, 7/00) – that imprints itself on the mind and haunts the senses. An improvised cadenza points to the disc’s jazz connotations: capricious in Snatches of a Conversation, with its ‘hard bop’ trumpet and Omar Ebrahim’s crazed Woody Allen intoning of exchanges half-heard or, more likely, half-imagined; direct in Paris-Dakar, where the relationship between trombone and big band intriguingly evokes George Russell rather than Leonard Bernstein. Two improvisations after Eötvös’s recent opera La Balcon, lively and poetic by turns, round off the disc.

The performances – assembled from a variety of sources – are as authoritative as one would expect given the composer’s presence either as conductor or supervisor, with booklet notes informative or diverting according to the nature of each piece. The Intervalles/Windsequenzen disc is primarily for converts to Eötvös’s musical ethos, but ‘Snatches’ makes an ideal and rewarding point of entry.