One could be forgiven for thinking after the first minute or so that Tavener’s Palintropos, for piano and orchestra, was composed around the same time as his more famous The Protecting Veil. An opening chord stretches out over resonating low double basses, its suspended sonorities hinting at the composer’s iconographic style and imagery. But instead of a searing solo cello line we hear twitching, pulsing patterns on percussion, harp and brass. The opening string sound is soon revealed to contain all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, and when the main theme appears on piano – a jagged two-note leap and rising glissando, followed by a rapid swirl of demisemiquavers – we know that we are in a very different sound world from the Tavener of Song for Athene or the Missa Wellensis.

Meaning ‘a turning-back structure’, Palintropos was composed during the composer’s stay on the Greek island of Patmos in 1978. Premiered the following year by Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich and the CBSO, it has largely gone under the radar, eclipsed by more popular choral works. As heard on this premiere recording, the 1970s Tavener vintage is not only more volatile and unpredictable but arguably more colourful and inventive too.

Parts of Palintropos are almost shocking in their directness and intensity, aided by an unflinchingly direct, physical and tactile performance by Japanese pianist Aruhi and the New London Orchestra. In between the four statements of the main theme, which support the single movement’s 25-minute structure like a set of Doric pillars, the piano often leads the way, alternating rapid fistfuls of chords with sweeping angular lines.

Sometimes shadowed by the celesta, the piano’s quieter moments see Tavener redrafting ideas from an earlier solo piano composition called Palin, where delicately repeating notes and floating string lines contain, in Ivan Moody’s words, ‘some of the most sheerly beautiful music to be found anywhere in Tavener’s output’. The other work on this album, Michael Stewart’s ambient-infused Beyond Time and Space for piano, electronics and keyboards, was written in memory of Tavener. Stewart studied with the composer during the late 1970s – which, incidentally, would have been around the same time that he was composing Palintropos. Recommended.