Diversity is an outstanding feature of the ‘Music of Brazil’ series from Naxos, not only in turning up so many distinctive voices beyond Villa-Lobos but within the output of individual composers. The eclecticism of this Edino Krieger collection doesn’t quite rival the remarkable recent album of Santoro headlined by the Cello Concerto (11/23) but a blind listening might throw up any number of contextually unlikely points of comparison.

While Copland could write like Carter, and vice versa, they didn’t do so in the same piece, whereas the Elemental Variations of Krieger takes an arching, near-atonal theme, chills it out on the vibraphone, colours in Midwestern cornfields with a flute-saxophone duet and carries on from there, oblivious to ‘the rules’. The penultimate variation (of 10) is pure Agon for 30 seconds, before the equally brief finale signs off with a Ruggles-like, sandstone abrasiveness.

A 15-minute setting of the Song of Songs flitters in and out of Messiaen’s aviary, before Estro armonico casts a mirthless laugh in the face of anyone in the mood for neo-Vivaldi. Abstraction gets a terrible name these days, having become (entirely falsely) associated with bloodless academicism, and the note here will not persuade anyone otherwise (‘a succession of large blocks of sound that differ from one another in terms of the intervals between their notes’). The piece itself covers remarkable ground in eight minutes, leading a keen ear with the kind of covert counterpoint that’s under the lid of the Variations.

A trio of instrumental sketches captures ‘New Fribourg’ – a mountain town northeast of Rio – with moody strings and a Gothic-style Bernard Herrmann part for harpsichord. Krieger could even stamp his individuality on that most tired of commissions, a five-minute festival opener: only the bell-capped uproar of Fanfarra e Sequências is listed as a first recording, but albums of Krieger hardly crowd the market. Thomson and his meticulously prepared, sympathetically engineered Goiás orchestra give the intrigued listener every reason to start here.