Back in 1976, Helmut Lachenmann composed his Accanto – a typically subversive and uncompromising critique of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and all that imperishable masterwork stands for. I suspect that Lachenmann would not be amused to hear a fleeting reference to the Mozart in the comic context of Leonard Eröd’s Kuckuckseier (‘Cuckoo’s Eggs’), which closes Matthias Schorn’s recital disc. Here is a programme blissfully – or depressingly – unaware of anything avant-garde or experimental: a collection of 11 short pieces, any one of which might provide a relaxing encore after a proper recital programme but which heard end to end threaten an overdose of musical trivia.

The most determined intimations of gravity are provided by veteran Friedrich Cerha, whose Rhapsodie even risks evoking the ecstatic birdsong given to the clarinet in Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. There are brief hints of extended playing techniques in the quarter-tones of Athanasia Tzanou’s otherwise uneventful Longtemps, and two other composers ask Schorn to provide percussive counterpoint by tapping the instrument (Breinschmid’s tour/retour) or stamping rhythmically (Sulzer’s Canzonette). But wistful lyricism and dance-like perkiness are the most commonly encountered moods, along with would-be witty references to compositional precursors as disparate as Wagner, in Paul Engel’s Siegfried ist tot – Es lebe Siegfried, and Saint-Säens (together with Mozart and others) in Eröd’s Kuckuckseier. The jazz inflections of Tango cluBb and Clari Nice Guy also help to keep blandness at bay, and Schorn dispatches everything with unimpeachable fluency, recorded in the warmly sympathetic resonance of Vienna’s Hofburgkapelle.