You suspect, in the great scheme of music, orchestral musicians would rather play nearly anything else than a 50-minute piece by Morton Feldman which can – and will – cruelly expose any lapse of intonation or rhythmic approximation. They’d rather play Gruppen, because who’s going to notice the occasional lucky-dip accidental; Webern because, although the Austrian 12-tone miniaturist demands comparable textural finesse to Feldman, there’s a pit stop after every few minutes. But Feldman needs each player to move with the delicacy and concentration of a chamber soloist while still contributing to the ensemble – this counter-intuitive state maintained for longer than seems decent.

I start from this admittedly niche observation because I once saw the BBC SO die as hard as a bad comedian at the Glasgow Empire playing Violin and Orchestra (1979) as they utterly failed to summon up the immersive concentration required, and a panicked, rudderless and under-prepared travesty unravelled in front of our ears. The Frankfurt RSO, under Emilio Pomàrico, is clearly made of sterner stuff. These musicians sound readied, able and willing to engage with Feldman’s aesthetic, and that they might even be secretly enjoying the experience.

That this performance is likely to be a winner becomes obvious from the outset; the honeyed resonance of Feldman’s opening brass chords, lazily flickering off and back on like strobe lighting, is blended and balanced to cool perfection. And it needs to be, because Carolin Widmann enters with a scuttling, skidding figuration that inhabits a different gestural world, but can only do so convincingly if the opposing gestures are strong and clear. Clicking percussion comes from nowhere; then the violin, sounding remarkably like a viola, comes back against a backwash of woodwind clusters with a sustained, stately melody.

And the piece is essentially a grand working-out of these opening moves, stretched, overlaid, small details enlarged, the embellishments themselves pulled bigger, then compressed, or remapped, or reconfigured, or placed in reordered perspectives. Pomàrico keeps the structures arithmetically taut, which liberates the music – a mysterious, existential ritual.