When Thomas Simaku, born in Albania, moved to the UK in 1991, he discovered the 20th-century avant-garde tradition. Thereafter, his music changed from politically engaged neo-tonality to post-tonal music (he is currently Professor of Composition at the University of York). Simaku began his Soliloquys cycle of solo works in 1989, and three of them are collected on this disc, along with two works from another, parallel solo cycle. The performers are soloists of Ensemble Intercontemporain – enough said. If you like your modernism varnished yet with the odd floorboard creak, here’s a disc for you.

Soliloquy VII for clarinet and resonant piano, which has shades of Boulez’s Dialogue de l’ombre double, opens with a sustained multiphonic that eventually slides in a glissando into a lyrical phrase – an emblem of how Simaku’s style toys with new complexity but nestles within conservative modernism. Comte’s performance is astounding, exploding into paroxysms at either end of the clarinet’s register, then retreating and gently wooing us with barely-there tremolando. Soliloquy IX for trumpet and resonant piano makes better use of the piano’s resonance. Long, stately notes on trumpet outline a slow melody setting the piano strings humming, a silhouette against a red evening sky. In Soliloquy VIII for marimba plus other percussion, Simaku made a virtue of the marimba’s limitations (little sustained resonance). He uses the instrument almost as an orchestral ensemble, with lines racing around all over the instrument (‘no note is spared within the five-octave spectrum’, he remarks).

Catena II for piano continues a cycle started in 2019. Each of its six continuous movements has a specific focus: a pitch or a gesture, for example. There are moments of nocturnal beauty, as in the wandering lines of the fourth movement, with scattered flashing pitches in the high register. The subsequent movement contrasts with this, impetuous and nervous with repeated semiquaver notes racing around. Catena III, ‘Corona’ for piano is a single-movement, quarter-hour-long work fraught with anguish. Cluster-like chords ring out and decay gradually à la Rebecca Saunders, and Simaku expresses the turmoil of the early Covid pandemic era.