Lots of composers write music that sounds like Louis Andriessen’s – but luckily Louis Andriessen isn’t one of them. The tart, witheringly brittle power-minimalism with which Andriessen made his name 40 years ago ended up becoming every bit a New Music cliché as the dispassionate serial music he once stood against. Now 72, it’s good to hear Andriessen continuing the trend of recent pieces by writing so determinedly against type.

Anaïs Nin (2009-10) is described as a monologue and a musical stage play for one voice. And Andriessen’s been very fortunate with his singer, Cristina Zavalloni, who inhabits the character of Anaïs Nin with peculiar presence and directness. The texts are characteristic Nin: negligee-lifting narratives about her one-time lovers René Allendy, Antonin Artaud and Henry Miller packed with sexual ecstasy both attained and desired. Andriessen’s score is a curious melange of Kurt Weill deviant cabaret – wobbly saxophones and Big Sid Catlett drums to the fore – with a slight neoclassical reticence to push for the expressive kill. ‘The Seduction’ briefly nudges the work towards grand opera and it’s down to Zavalloni to carry the drama when Andriessen can’t quite complete on the promise of the melodic contours he sketches out.

And from sex to politics. De staat (1972-76), setting texts by Plato about the role of politics in music, is pretty much Andriessen’s signature piece. The reference recording is Reinbert de Leeuw’s 1990 performance with the Schoenberg Ensemble, against whom the London Sinfonietta sound implacably accurate (I wonder what patching was done) but slightly well-behaved. But Synergy Vocals intone Andriessen’s killer vocal parts with a lustier cry than elsewhere. On this disc, the vocalists have it.