Although his prominence among European composers has come about primarily through his operas, Peter Eötvös has been equally prolific in terms of concertos – with the three featured on this new release taking his tally up to a dozen. Earliest here is the Cello Concerto grosso (2011), its title underlining the role of the eight orchestral cellos as ‘sounding board’, within which solo cello plots an eventful course especially when the presence of Transylvanian dances imparts a vigorous and frequently aggressive quality. The work’s three movements evolve their own formal logic as they progress. It’s the same with those of DoReMi (2012), Eötvös’s Second Violin Concerto. The title is a play on the name of the dedicatee Midori, but is also indicative of a motivic simplicity that underpins this music’s skittish and often surreal progress (again over three movements) but reaches a suddenly pensive cadenza and poetic closing ‘nightscape’.

Ostensibly more concrete, Speaking Drums (2013) is itself a virtuoso percussion concerto for Martin Grubinger. His instrumental agility is enhanced by vocal contributions that draw on poems by Sándor Weöres in a forthright ‘Dance Song’ and ominous ‘Nonsens [sic] Songs’, before the final Passacaglia similarly features texts by the 11th-century poet Jayadeva as it heads via a visceral cadenza-like workout towards its effervescent conclusion. All three performances, two from the artists for whom the pieces were written (Jean-Guihen Queyras substituting for Miklós Perényi), evince the combination of technical rigour and interpretative flair these works require in abundance; while the OPRF musicians play with alacrity under Eötvös’s direction. Superbly recorded and decently annotated, this disc is recommended to admirers of and newcomers to a composer whose musical imagination knows few bounds.