Nothing here need give Elton John or James Blunt any sleepless nights. For starters, none of these 30 love songs have any words. When the Freiburg-based Ensemble Recherche asked a selection of their favourite composers to write them a short love song to mark their 25th anniversary in 2010, the brief was to compose an instrumental work that teased with the idea that, since the emergence of the post-war avant-garde, the love song had become an aesthetic no-no; ‘instead the subject was left to pop, rock and other types of commercial music,’ the booklet-notes tells us.

The sniffy implication that rock and pop musicians have somehow done the love song a disservice is a pity – from the Proustian power of Ray Davies’s ‘Days’ to Janis Joplin’s raw ‘Piece of my heart’, pop music has nothing to be ashamed of. But, of course, the task of composing a love song without words, and possibly with failsafe conventional tonality jettisoned, is not an easy one: when we’re in love, cliché is never far away – how to write love music without pressing obvious expressive buttons sets an intriguing challenge.

Some composers miss the point altogether. Had Ensemble Recherche commissioned a set of songs about the Common Agricultural Policy, Mark André’s aridly pointillistic iv 9 for bass flute, cor anglais and bass clarinet would have been a triumph; similarly you might not want to date Chaya Czernowin, whose textbook new-music scrapings and subtone rustling-based Lovesong sounds like she’s set her income tax code.

But other composers deal with the issues at hand more resourcefully. Nicolaus A Huber’s An die Musik presents the musicians with written-in mistakes that they must erase to find the music’s pure heart; Christopher Fox’s Lines of desire showcases a keening viola line that artfully dodges the usual loved-out melodic intervals; Georg Friedrich Haas’s Drei Liebeslieder likewise compresses emotion as lines journey upwards and beyond – like champagne corks popping out of bottles.