As Christopher Austin points out, an assessment of Ben Foskett’s composing this past decade needs to take into account his ballet output, as well as orchestrations for film and television. Even so, this ‘portrait’ disc makes for a viable overview of a period during which his music has evolved in distinctive though unexpected ways. Certainly Five Night Pieces (2001) feels indebted to post-war modernism in harmonic density and fragmented yet keenly controlled momentum. With Hornet II (2004), however, the emphasis is already shifting towards a more concrete and dramatic presentation of ideas – the two movements pursuing a subtly contrasted approach to the relationship of clarinet and ensemble as amounts to a satisfying whole despite (or because of?) its inherent duality. The likely culmination of this phase, the Proms commission From Trumpet (2009), unfolds as a free passacaglia whose textures become more stratified and tangibly melodic as the piece opens out expressively before its almost impatient ending.

On From Four (2011) marked the 400th anniversary of Hatfield House and derives its inspiration through a distinctly modern take on the ‘broken consort’, juxtaposing its elegiac and energetic passages so as to bring about a more impulsive continuation. Gesture and line are the salient aspects of Dinosaur (2012), a solo flute piece whose ancestry in Debussy and Varèse does not impede an individual persona from emerging over three sections of mounting animation and technical panache. Finally, Cinq Chansons à Hurle-Vent (2012) sets poems by Laure Salama in which the principal characters of Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë as well as Cathy and Heathcliff – meet in a song-cycle whose intertwining soprano and soprano saxophone make a virtue of their registral similarity, resulting in music as poised as it is plangent. The excellence of the performances enhances a disc that leaves one fascinated as to where Foskett is headed next.