Thomas Larcher’s The Living Mountain is a realist, handheld-camera response to the Hollywood glitz of Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. The soprano sings the climber’s snippets from Nan Shepherd’s book of the same name, joined by a brittle little ensemble that can be arrestingly literal (you’ll hear wind, vertigo and a white-out) but is so very delicate and just as cinematic as Strauss’s orchestra. The work opens with a prelude that could be a distant avalanche – a simple roll on a drum. This is storytelling music that approaches Abrahamsen for lucidity, but there are telling moments in which Larcher is drawn into the world of harmony he so relishes (on the opening line from the third song, ‘In September dawns …’). He is transfixed by texts that obviously trigger his own fascination for mountaineering.

Larcher’s music defies easy description because it just ‘is’ – it seems unworked, uncompromising and impulsive. If you could compare the lucidity of The Living Mountain to Abrahamsen, you might align the stringent distillation of the 13 songs of Unerzählt to that of Kurtág. It sets Haiku-like poems by WG Sebald for baritone and piano with extended techniques. Again, you’re impressed by how much Larcher can evoke with occasionally depressed piano keys and a vocal line (notably in ‘Am 8. Mai 1927’) and how loudly his music speaks at its most sparse. The style pings back through the 20th-century avant-garde to Mahler and Schubert, sometimes knowingly clever, but again, that’s clearly just who Larcher is. All the while the music is never coy or elusive. Andrè Schuen, something of a Larcher specialist, isn’t afraid to make his voice plain (notably in ‘Es heisst’). Sarah Aristidou is evocative in the mountain songs but it would have been good to have a native English singer there, as we have a native Austro-German (Tyrolean) one here.

The compact cello concerto Ouroboros sits well between the song-cycles, a reminder that Larcher is fundamentally a lyrical composer even when voices aren’t concealing the wood in the trees. The cello is the dynamo at the centre of the piece, which can be performed without conductor. It isn’t here, though you’d have thought Alisa Weilerstein more able than anyone to anchor it. It’s tense, rich in material (much of it rhythmic) and again shows Larcher being pulled towards canonical harmonic styles, in this case Baltic-style parallel harmonies and some more shadows of Pärt besides. Consistently engaging music from a composer who says what he needs to say.