Gloria Coates (b1938) is here described in composer-critic Kyle Gann’s notes as ‘an atonal-expressionist post-minimalist…her music is a vehicle for dark, disturbing emotions, for whom the range of musical sounds must be greatly expanded to blast through audience complacency and address the special horrors of our time’.

All these works are dominated by oppressively wearisome glissandi, a Coates speciality which her teacher at Louisiana State University suggested, with some justice, were ‘too, too…’. He did not complete the sentence with the obvious word, ‘much’.

Cette Blanche Agonie, a setting of Mallarmé’s poem describing ‘the virginal vibrant dawn’, opens with a drum roll as a prelude to a dominating cor anglais solo (soon curiously distorted into ‘harsh multiphonics’ and becoming increasingly florid). The voice enters over a roving, grumbling bass and weirdly moves upwards and down and about, usually in small intervals including half-notes, towards an oscillating, closing yelp. This truly illustrates the song’s title (although the composer tells us that the text ‘should not be understood, but is only part of the music abstractly’).

The three-movement Indian Sounds Symphony which follows seems at first almost like an extension of the song setting without the soprano soloist. However the sinuous melodic line played by the cor anglais, a Winnebago American Indian theme, is more recognisably melodic and the second movement’s melody is taken up by the oboe against chanting voices, inevitably leading to Coates’s endlessly repeated eerie glissandi. The finale draws on another pentatonic theme from the Seneca tribe, quite haunting in its melancholy feeling, but again continually repeated. It moves forward like a funeral dirge over a steady drum beat, but is interrupted first with upward, then downward wavery glissandi (and with voices, too). I could not help nostalgically remembering an inspired Haydn Quartet, Op 76 No 6, where in the Minuet’s Trio the players alternately move down and up a scale with deliciously witty civilised elegance.

The cantata The Force for Peace in War is easily the most impressive piece here, a dramatic early work which achieves its opening glissandi by the more obvious device of a wind machine. Its vocal line is often almost lyrical, although still very angular. Eight separate vignettes powerfully illustrate themes from the Second World War – first a prisoner’s death at Dachau, perhaps linked to the anguished lament of a young widow, followed by an ironic (piano-accompanied) BBC weather report: ‘conditions ideal for bombing’. An evocation of ‘Flying Bombs’ is followed by a quaintly remembered children’s rhyme. Then glissandi introduce a horrific ‘Hiroshima’ crescendo, and the work ends with an impassioned, tonal vocal plea for peace, most eloquently delivered by the excellent soloist, Sigune von Osten.

Glissandi return with a vengeance at the opening of Wir Tönen Allein (‘We sound alone’), a dismal wartime reminiscence, again with the percussion very important, and the vocal part less so. The same applies to the spectacular slithery watery effects, vocal and instrumental, of Fonte di Rimini. I must praise all the vocalists throughout the programme for their apparent security with difficult and often unrewarding vocal lines, the brilliant orchestral playing, the conductors, Jürgen Wirrmann and Matthias Kuntzsch, for their dedication, and the recording engineers for excellent balances. All this for scores which are undoubtedly imaginatively grotesque, and which might work well enough (one at a time) in live performance – especially the cantata. But on disc they are possible to admire but, for me, difficult to enjoy, or want to return to.