One of the disconcerting things about listening to Wolfgang Rihm’s music is the impression of a composer thinking aloud, but on paper. It’s as though he’d lost his eraser, permanently: rather than edit, he reconsiders and rectifies but never corrects. The earliest of the pieces recorded here fit the young Rihm’s enfant terrible image, calculated tantrums pour épater l’avant-garde. That was 40 years ago; and the small-scale Violin Sonata and the sketch-like Hekton (both completed in the early 1970s) have at least their epigrammatic mode of expression to recommend them. Completed 20 or so years later, Antlitz and Phantom und Eskapade are more extended, their general outlook more often lyrical, the overdrawn, deliberately ugly gestures replaced by galloping figures. By the turn of the century the move towards lyricism, embodied in the Über die Linie series, seems more or less complete. The seventh of these, for solo violin, completes the recital. It’s the most extended work on the disc by far, the most coherent in its affect and style and yet, bizarrely, just as discursive as the rest.

The devotion that Rihm attracts from his performers is impressive and this young duo is no exception. Both deploy a full range of colour and nuance, and the ability to change mood in an instant. The early pieces might just have benefited from a touch more savagery, however: music as deliberately irritating as this deserves nothing less.