French composers launching their careers in the early 1990s – Eric Montalbetti was born in 1968 – had a rich mix of local influences to respond to: Messiaen, pre-eminently, but also Dutilleux, Xenakis, Boulez, Grisey and Murail were all forces to be reckoned with. As for sources from further afield, Montalbetti’s music suggests that he enjoys a kind of postmodernism that has affinities with romanticism or Impressionism, acknowledging the continued relevance of Debussy and Satie – even, just possibly, of Jacques Ibert and Les Six. All this, while at the same time the booklet notes reference the rather different technical concerns of Elliott Carter. The stage seems set for a demonstration of unashamed eclecticism.

The four works included here provide challenging workouts for some first-class performers, led by Christian Tetzlaff. The three-movement Piano Trio, dating from the mid-’90s, then revised in 2015, celebrates different initiatives in the visual arts – suprematism (El Lissitzky and Malevich), orphism (Sonia and Robert Delaunay) and futurism (Boccioni). The emphasis is on energetic pattern-making, with repetitions combined in different, often highly diverse contrapuntal textures and moving from what in the first movement could almost be an echo of Schoenberg’s Phantasy for violin and piano to more static, minimalist rotations, all projected with wit and precision in this performance.

The String Quartet was premiered in 2019 and its title, Harmonieuses dissonances, underlines the almost classical relish for gradually synthesising apparently opposed ideas and textures as the 24-minute score unfolds. As with the Trio, the rhapsodic style can come across as more mock-dramatic than truly intense, the drive to homogeneity reducing positive contrast to a very subordinate role but without the gripping sense of steady forward impetus that gives Messiaen’s slowest meditations their emotional depth. Similarly, the Duo for violin and piano, written for Tetzlaff and Lars Vogt, which runs for almost 19 minutes, combines a distinctly modernistic febrility (perhaps in homage to Carter’s masterwork with the same title) with lyrical and decorative figuration that risks lowering the expressive temperature in ways that the more tautly constructed motivic ideas do not.

Hommage à Matisse (also premiered in 2019) is another celebration of a painter who revelled in decorative exuberance, and by restricting his range of colours to clarinet and voice Montalbetti shows just how successful he can be in blending a winning directness of expression with a subtlety that comes from constantly varied inflections of dynamics and tone-colour. The first, shortest movement is especially beguiling in this fine performance; and if the rest of the work isn’t quite as engaging in the sheer character of its material, the intermittent use of improvisation lends an extra degree of spontaneity to the eclectic but far from pallidly derivative effect.