Edgard Varèse’s Intégrales – completed in 1925, 10 years after he first set sail for Manhattan – acts as a salient reminder that New York City is all about the itch and joy of discovery. Varèse’s serrated-edge brass, cluster-bomb woodwind and the intelligent chatter of his percussion-writing still sound, all these years later, like we’re being granted unique dispensation to eavesdrop on sounds of the future. Elliott Carter’s overcooked and fussy Clarinet Concerto, written as recently as 1996, by comparison already sounds like music set in aspic – and this two-CD survey of music from New York revolves around those two polarities.

Matthias Pintscher divides his time between New York (where he teaches at the Juilliard School) and Paris (he has been music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain since last year), but attempting to take the temperature of New York music without including any work from black or Asian composers – and all these composers are male – feels like a lost opportunity. David Fulmer’s Within his bending sickle’s compass come and Sean Shepherd’s Blur might have been written in New York but their slickly schooled pieces could equally have slotted into a round-up of the sort of fare presented regularly at central European new music festivals.

Steve Reich’s plundering (and looping) of emotive voice recordings captured during New York’s darkest day for his September 11 memorial WTC 9/11 has always left me feeling uncomfortable, and I wonder what place John Cage’s 1938 Music for Wind Instruments – jaunty little divertimento-like pieces written while he was living on the West Coast – really has in this context. A cleanly executed and spacious performance of Morton Feldman’s Instruments I (1974) returns us to the concentration on pure sound that Varèse (whom Feldman greatly admired) unleashed at the opening. This is a problematic set in both its conception and, especially in the Varèse and Carter, the instrumental attack, which lacks rudeness, grit and fight.