Nicolas Hodges stares into the middle distance, his fingers perched over the keyboard, his pupils fully dilated: cover art that strikes a pose like a rabbit caught in headlights. And well it might. Brian Ferneyhough’s piano music throws up technical challenges that are, famously, in a class all of their own. Rhythmic intricacy is his calling card. The buzz-phrase ‘New Complexity’ hangs around like the ghost of genres past. But the real challenge Hodges faces – with technical chops aplenty – is that of scooping out musical meaning from behind the notes.

This set rounds up music composed between 1965 and 2013. Ferneyhough terms the earliest pieces documented here – Invention (1965), Epigrams (1966), Three Pieces for piano (1966-67) and Sonata for two pianos (1966) – as ‘autodidactic projects’, works that were intentionally designed to frame, and then solve, specific issues of compositional technique and musical form. The sound world they inhabit, rooted explicitly in Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen, tells you everything you could need to know about why this composer needed to exile himself from the UK, even if the pieces themselves can remain frustratingly unyielding.

The compositional itches Ferneyhough scratches are intellectually stimulating, and there was a time in my life when I relished taking these scores apart analytically, tracing lines of congruence between pitch and form – but I’m not convinced that Hodges makes a particularly watertight case for how this music operates in terms of sound.

Lemma-Icon-Epigram (1981) represents Ferneyhough and the piano coming of age, but Hodges’s icy formality lacks the spaciousness and differentiation of line that both Ian Pace (NMC) and Marino Formenti (Col Legno) bring to their respective recordings. Opus Contra Naturam (2000) for speaking pianist originally functioned as a scene in Ferneyhough’s Walter Benjamin-inspired opera Shadowtime. When it was premiered, all talk on the avant-garde grapevine spoke of Ferneyhough composing a piece that involved knock-knock jokes.

And they’re genuinely amusing! The pianist is cast as a Liberace-meets-Richard Clayderman glitzy nightclub pianist who taunts Benjamin as he descends towards the Underworld. Hodges’s poker-face delivery adds a narrative. Moreover, the sound of his voice as it lends sonic contrast to Ferneyhough’s piano-writing highlights inbuilt problems elsewhere – synthetic atonality dropped on the synthetic temperament of a grand piano, in this case, gives a curiously anaemic brew.