The music of Fred Lerdahl (b1943) may just be one of America’s great secret treasures. Here is a composer, now in his seventies, a distinguished academic and author as well as acclaimed composer, three times a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, yet not widely known outside America, though Bridge’s series devoted to his music is helping rectify that. (Vol 3, of the three string quartets – No 3 also a Pulitzer finalist – was enthusiastically reviewed by Jed Distler, 2/12.)

One of those Pulitzer-nominated works, Time and Again (2014), is featured on Bridge’s fifth disc. Scored for chamber orchestra, it is one of a number of works concerned with the notion of ‘musical temporality’; the piano trio Times 3 (2012) is another such, as is Time After Time, featured on Vol 1. Time and Again is an enthralling small-orchestral fantasia constructed around a string ‘signal’ which occurs three times.

The titles of Times 3’s three movements – ‘Ratios’, ‘Cycles’ and ‘Phases’ – hint at the internal processes within each movement. The medium of the piano trio strips away the textural richness of some of Lerdahl’s other scores, revealing the musical skeletal structure in the same way that a cutaway engine illustrates the workings of a car. More beguiling still is the quarter-hour long essay in pianissimo, Quiet Music (1994), given here in its 2001 transcription for two pianos. Leading off is the early wind quintet Episodes and Refrains (1982): forget the Birtwistlesque implications of the title, this is late Stravinsky moved on several degrees. With excellent performances and fine sound, this is an album I will return to, and Lerdahl’s music I want to explore further.