It began in West Yorkshire, back in the earliest days of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, when California-based composer Roger Reynolds heard the Arditti Quartet play Xenakis and fell immediately under the spell of Rohan de Saram, the group’s then cellist. And the piece Reynolds wrote for de Saram, Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward… (1989), was to evolve into an immersive séance on words by the poet James Merrill.

Quarter of a century later, as played by Alexis Descharmes, the piece remains fresh-minted but also thrillingly open-ended – a structure that is always bigger than your attempts to contain it. If all this speak of beams focusing – and, what’s more, being emptied of thinking – puts you in mind of quack New Age therapies, fear not. The long-bowed slumber of the beginning, throbbing tones that imply a harmonic context which Reynolds at first keeps tantalisingly under wraps, gradually gathers pace – the music’s rhythmic life dragging its understated harmonic beginnings along for the ride.

Compared to the radical surgery Reynolds performed on percussion technique during his percussion ensemble epic Sanctuary (1/12), his view of cello technique is more conformist. But Reynolds remains forever disarming. What other composer could have arrived at a score like Thoughts, Places, Dreams for cello and chamber orchestra (2013), where textures are flicked on and off – as if the piece were a continuum but with layers that are being constantly dimmed or snuffed out altogether.

Reynolds himself appears reading sections of text that inspired his pieces. And the rich, mellifluous tones of his speaking voice hold some clue to this music. A Crimson Path for cello and piano (2000 02) curves mysteriously against reality, thematic fragments and gestural utterances folding back in on themselves. imagE/cello and imAge/cello (both 2007) ladle sound out from the base-physics of the instrument: keening harmonics in the first piece leading to vicious strumming in the sequel. But, as in Thoughts, Places, Dreams, we never quite see the whole. Reynolds plants seeds in our memory, challenging us to apply our memories of what we think we heard earlier, or might have heard, against the music we’re now hearing – which itself has already evaporated into the air.