The idea of Frank Zappa’s compositions becoming repertory music is a delicious irony, though not entirely an accidental one. On one hand, he regarded most classical ensembles as glorified bar bands covering other people’s hits; on the other, he often said he played rock music only because no classical musicians would play his works. For Zappa, seriousness and shock value went hand in hand, and the key to being in his club was knowing how to separate the two.

Ensemble Modern is a cover band extra-ordinaire. Few ensembles have such a knack for untangling knotty music and remaking themselves within a given composer’s personal idiom. As far as Zappa was concerned, the same juvenile irreverence that tossed off titles like Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow and My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama could also dispense subtler musical parodies tweaking Webern and Varèse. Boulez’s pioneering Zappa recording with Ensemble InterContemporain, ‘The Perfect Stranger’, read the jokes but missed the punch line (HMV, 12/84).

With the Ensemble Modern, more than a year of rehearsal went into making their initial recording, ‘The Yellow Shark’ – so much work, in fact, that die-hard Zappa fans still regard the groupas ‘Zappa’s last band’. Much of those efforts included orchestration, since Zappa often preferred playing his thornier inspirations directly in a synclavier rather than hearing them sullied by human imperfections. But for a band like Ensemble Modern, who had earlier realised Conlon Nancarrow’s player-piano rolls, this was a change in technology rather than concept.

Those days with the composer during his lifetime still pay off in this recording, which reunites the Ensemble with longtime Zappa musicians and arrangers Ali N Askin and Todd Yvega to finish Zappa’s original plans to adapt The Adventures of Greggory Peccary and Revised Music for Low-Budget Symphony Orchestra. Once again, the results are truer to the composer’s intent than some of Zappa’s own recordings. With every new band, Zappa’s habit of tinkering with material assured that it would always stay fresh. Unfortunately, it also ensured that it grew stale just as quickly. Zappa’s own performances of instrumental tunes such as The Beltway Bandits and Peaches En Regalia on his albums ‘Jazz from Hell’ and ‘Hot Rats’ are filled with dated sounds and recording techniques that place them firmly in their time.

Both the arrangements and the performances here add a perspective that Zappa himself often missed. It’s hard to write for posterity when you’re playing for the moment, but this recording assigns those respective duties to fully deserving delegates.