Lachenmann’s title is a playful tease in the spirit of the toy frogs who pop up in his 1983 ensemble piece Mouvement (– vor der Erstarrung). Of course there are no tunes in My Melodies, though a 14-minute sequence of bonus tracks outlines a motivic map for the piece, and the composer speaks (auf Deutsch) to Johann Jahn about how rigorously his teacher Nono insisted on effacing from his pupil’s work not only any trace of melodic contour but anything which could be confused (heaven, or Marx, forfend) with melodic development.

Still, relax. We need not fall back on nominative determinism – the painting of Lachenmann as a twinkly, Werther’s Original uncle of new music – to enjoy an exuberant instrumental theatre of the mind’s eye in this 45-minute piece for eight horns and (large) orchestra initially completed in 2018, then revised before this performance at the 2023 ‘musica viva’ concerts in Munich.

From Schumann to Stockhausen, horns have expressed distance and enchantment, and their opening flourish here conforms to type. So, in a different way, does the collapse of notes into ‘toneless’ texture (from 4'00"). Lachenmann talks about this characteristic sonority as the music listening to itself, which comes over readily in concert, less so when the sound is all there is.

Second and third hearings confirm, though, that Lachenmann still writes with a uniquely sharp ear and sense of timing for the drama to be made from combining pitched and unpitched sound. He never tries the listener’s patience with material already heard and grasped, but he is more generous than Elliott Carter in allowing for the listener’s mind to catch up with his own. Taking us up to roughly halfway through is a heady ‘fugue’ of horns panting and hissing, increasingly punctuated by the larger ensemble on a gigantic hunt.

A bit of big-band harmony resets the course. A spectacular cadenza is taken by the horn section of the Bavarian Radio SO with a daredevil bravado to defy Henze’s old quip about his colleague writing ‘musica negativa’. Score, performance, recording: all as exhilarating as a work for eight horns and orchestra has any right to be.