The first of Ruders’s Nightshade Trilogy was composed in 1986 for the London-based Capricorn Ensemble, who here give it a superbly spooky performance under Oliver Knussen. The music is all about elemental contrasts, which the 10-piece ensemble is cannily chosen to enable. And what a superbly discomforting opening: everything something too low, too high, too dense or too abrasive. Not quite like the familiar Ruders, then, if there is such a thing, but a very useful reminder of his musical range, as well as the beginning of an utterly absorbing journey.

Two commissions followed – from the St Magnus Festival for a chamber orchestra work in 1991, and from the New York Philharmonic in 2003. Taken together, the three pieces expand both in forces deployed and in duration. At the same time the initial associations with ‘moonlight, tombstones, crypts’ open up to embrace a duality of bleak forests and pale moonlight, and finally a more abstract ‘slowly progressing symphonic development’ in the form of a 25-minute Adagio.

All three works are strikingly sepulchral; but one thing that emerges from continuous listening is the progressive musicalisation of material that starts as almost inchoate sound but ends up transfigured into something, in the composer’s own words, ‘classically polyphonic’, without losing its fundamental identity. The disc may not be the most generously filled but 50 minutes of Ruders is to my mind worth 100 of most of his peers, and handsomely repays repeated hearings. Excellent performances and recordings virtually go without saying, though they shouldn’t.