Music of high organisation, clarity and expressive power here from Rory Boyle, born in Ayr in 1951 and currently professor of composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Boyle’s rigour when it comes to form is notable – maybe too notable – in his Sonatina for clarinet and piano of 1979, dedicated to his sometime teacher Lennox Berkeley. But while the piece can feel like a rollercoaster cart being yanked on to the ‘correct’ tracks of recapitulation and development, etc, it reveals the composer’s gift for clear and almost vernacular-style melodies.

Boyle obviously found ways of disrupting that status quo and that is what I find most thrilling in the music that ensues on this largely chronological album. For all its fluency, his music can sound racked by neurosis, as in the grippingly contrary piano-writing in No 1 of his Four Bagatelles (1979, rev. 2014). The niggling, repeated D in No 2 shows that the composer means business but also that, on occasion, his ideas are good enough to be pursued and pushed a little more.

In Dramatis personae Boyle consciously undermines the watertight structures he has created: ‘Rogue’ suffers an evocative power-out; ‘Shadow’ sinks into its own despondency (magnificent quiet playing here from Langton); and ‘Fool’ trips over its own patterning. Di Tre Re i io, inspired by Honegger’s Fifth Symphony, is a lesson in how a homage should drive the secondary composer to energy and even neurosis but never to sycophancy or pastiche. Not a groundbreaking or hugely distinctive voice but an honest, interesting and disciplined one that has clearly touched the musicians on this recording. Langton’s technique is sure, his musicianship all-encompassing and his head balanced with his heart. James Willshire is just as uncompromising on keys but, frustratingly, does seem compromised by an uncouth instrument.