Across the 11 works on this three-disc set, which don’t sit too happily under the title ‘Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir’ whichever way you cut it, György Kurtág’s unmatched and exacting qualities as a composer make themselves felt in typically intuitive ways. In almost all the pieces included, from the ostensibly well-mannered …quasi una fantasia… to the kicking and raging Songs of Despair and Sorrow, we are reminded that while the music of Kurtág’s colleagues became ever more transcendent and international, he himself dug deeper into his own country’s soil and was never afraid to get mud on his shoes. A work such as Four Poems by Anna Akhmatova proves that sophistication is certainly not a casualty of that process.

Songs of Despair and Sorrow might bear allusions to Russian traditions in more than the language it sets but Kurtág’s vocal friction, ordered polyphony and unsettled whispering can be heard in works vocal and non-vocal throughout this collection, and indeed throughout Kurtág’s output. He sets Romanian in the biggest single movement recorded, Colindă-Baladă, based on a colindă collected by Bartók in 1913. Half collective ritual, half bustling narrative, this ultra-variegated, delicate and dense piece gets a slightly more shaky performance from the Netherlands Radio Choir than the Songs but perhaps the pay-off of full-on engagement with the music’s many tendrils necessitates it.

By contrast, the more spare Kurtág’s textures, the more this recording excels – and drops the jaw. There is some sense of that in the ‘forced inarticulation’ of Samuel Beckett: What is the Word but perhaps it’s heard best in the Four Capriccios, Messages of the Late Miss R Troussova, Brefs Messages and Grabstein für Stephan. Kurtág himself writes in the booklet that he asked musicians to re record some tracks, singing to them down the telephone when he thought they could improve on their first efforts. (I once saw him interrupt a concert when he wasn’t happy with a singer’s interpretation of a tiny song.) It’s easy to imagine this ultra-exacting composer having some thoughts on the latter piece, whose lonely beauty is only revealed when it finds its true equilibrium. The playing here is exquisite.

Likewise that Kurtág speciality: the fragment. Natalia Zagorinskaya sounds well aware in the Messages of the Late Miss R Troussova that these little revelations hinge on what is not said as much as what is. The composer’s freedom from the necessity to transition is as musically cleansing as it is communicatively direct, full of tantalising imagery. Right over at the back end of disc 3, these pieces have an instrumental partner in Brefs Messages. I misread the title as ‘brief messages’ at first but that is what you get and the music, in the hands of this composer who speaks most powerfully when he’s at his shortest, quietest and simplest (and often paradoxically cryptic as a result), is richer than many a deep, sprawling essay for it. A proper treasure trove.