What a good idea! Looking for practical ways to spread the word about emerging composers, the Berkeley Ensemble revisited the composition competitions organised in Britain in the early 20th century by the philanthropist Walter Willson Cobbett. Cobbett specified single-movement, multi-section chamber works inspired by the 17th-century Phantasy, and assiduously promoted the works that resulted. The Berkeley Ensemble’s ‘New Cobbett Prize’ appears to set the same parameters, with inclusion on this disc as part of the reward.

Cobbett was an open-minded soul, and he would surely have been delighted at the range of styles and the depth of imagination in the three winning pieces included here. The spirit of Messiaen hovers over Barnaby Martin’s Lazarus, in which, in parallel with the biblical story, a pregnant, ominous beginning opens out into music of quiet rapture, with cello and clarinet taking the roles of Christ and Lazarus respectively. Laurence Osborn’s Living Floors follows a similar trajectory, from dark, primal grindings and judderings to a sense of blossoming potential. Its huge, echoing textures and eerie microtonal cries evoke a Birtwistle-like vastness; a striking achievement for just two players (cello and bass).

Samuel Wesley Lewis’s Sequenza probably comes closest to the Phantasy form as Cobbett would have recognised it; taking taut neoclassical counterpoint as a springboard for a vivid urban nocturne, the glinting, piercing rhythmic patterns of its finale being derived, apparently, from motorway warning lights. Like everything here – including three Aldeburgh Purcell transcriptions and (a nod to the original Cobbett Prize) William Hurlstone’s 1905-vintage Phantasie Quartet – it’s performed with energy, sensitivity and superb refinement; bass player Lachlan Radford plays with particular subtlety and expression. I hope this project succeeds. It certainly deserves to.