Beat Furrer, born in 1954 and based in Austria, is a composer who has remained faithful to the principles and beliefs of the post-1945 avant-garde. Serious without being ponderous, intense without inflexibility, his music is colouristically inventive and subtle in texture. But the works on this CD, mainly from the 1990s, seem less successful as structures intended for repeated listening.

The Quartet for Percussion (1995) is typical. For 24 minutes it works with contrasts between complete or virtual silence and relatively brief bursts of activity which could be aspiring to the kind of resonant toccata-style perfected by Boulez in Répons and Sur Incises. But whereas Boulez creates a quasi-symphonic continuity and an incremental sense of excitement and exuberance, Furrer’s persistent oppositions risk appearing desultory, with too little sense of evolution over time.

Of the other compositions, I would judge Face de la chaleur (1991) to be the most successful, not least because at a mere nine minutes the transparency and vitality with which it begins are more effectively sustained. Yet even here the contrasts begin to seem arbitrary rather than inevitable, and this attribute makes it hard for me to get much – thus far, at least – from the larger works for chorus and instruments, Dort ist das Meer and Stimmen. Comprehension of these is not helped by the rather pretentious booklet notes, short on hard information. This is a case in which being told exactly what one might be hearing would be no bad thing.