The five chamber pieces on this recording were all completed within the last 10 years, mostly in the lead-up to the composition of Ferneyhough’s first stage-work, Shadowtime. The latest, the miniature woodwind trio In nomine, was written at the same time as the opera, and points the way to a growing feature of the composer’s recent music: the increasing incorporation of musical materials from the past. The even shorter Streichtrio is a by-product of work on the major piece from this ‘pre-Shadowtime’ period, the String Trio.

The most outgoing piece, and the one that shows off the Ensemble Recherche at its often formidable best, is Flurries, the first half of which consists of a series of contrasted duos. Its extrovert dynamism, its exuberant use of bright colours, gives the lie yet again to the prevalent view of Ferneyhough as a cerebral composer. Incipits, for viola, percussion and ensemble, takes as its premise a similar conceit to Italo Calvino’s novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller: the piece consists of a series of ‘opening gambits’ which run on into one another. That aside, Incipits is remarkable for the economy with which Ferneyhough deploys the percussion part, which includes what must be one of the few virtuoso parts for rainstick in the repertory.

Ensemble Recherche give highly characterised accounts of each piece, and as a whole this is one of the most attractive Ferneyhough CDs to have appeared in the last decade. But the work (and the performance) that makes this an indispensable acquisition is the String Trio. Conceived as a response to Schoenberg’s late masterpiece, its form is both very legible and satisfyingly complex, its main argument interspersed at intervals by ‘interventions’ that show off Ferneyhough’s string-writing at its most shadowy and poetic. In its widening range of materials (including passages of surprising simplicity) it illustrates the increasing freedom of Ferneyhough’s recent work, and the result has an expressive depth that I, for one, found deeply moving. Ensemble Recherche’s response to this score represents a tremendous achievement.