Even when working with large-scale forces such as opera and music theatre, Michael Berkeley’s style and expression remain attuned to the more intimate nuances of chamber music. Perhaps this is because the chamber context provides such an effective vehicle for one of his music’s most distinctive features – the often dichotomous interplay between the individual and the group.

Spanning over 30 years, all the works contained here explore this theme in various ways. The isolated individual is present from the very beginning of the Clarinet Quintet, with its yearning, searching solo melody. The music eventually gathers pace and is transformed in the middle section into a strident dancelike theme, taken up by the string quartet in dotted rhythms. Echoes of the klezmer tradition hint at an autobiographical subtext before the music finally returns to the solipsistic tone of the opening.

More subtle intensification of the ‘subject versus the group’ is heard in Seven, where a slowly repeating four-note figure appearing mainly in the harp shifts this way and that, between comforting consonance and uneasy dissonance, before finally resting on an E major triad. Mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron represents the lone voice in the song-cycle Winter Fragments, while the idea is distilled further in Berkeley’s restrained setting of Rilke’s ‘Sonnet for Orpheus’, where the muse this time inhabits the creative individual in a strange, almost catatonic state.

Not every outcome is bleak or unsettling, however. Catch Me If You Can pits the individual against the group in a more playful, mischievous manner, with the outer movements foregrounding rapid flourishes which occasionally coalesce into strident unison melodies or climax in caterwauling shrieks. In the central slow movement an elegiac line is passed around the ensemble, suggesting a melody without a home. But maybe the point is that – despite one’s isolation – music is that home. The Berkeley Ensemble, directed by Dominic Grier, are excellent throughout – entirely at one with the music of their namesake composer.