The Neos label continues to venture where others refuse to (or no longer) tread with its third release devoted to music by Ernst Helmuth Flammer (b1949). Active as a conductor, lecturer and organiser (notably in his native Heilbronn), he has built a notable output of works which bear testimony to studies with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough.

A questing approach to timbre and texture, allied to a complex temporal ground-plan, is evident in the Fourth String Quartet (1997). Its 57 minutes unfold over 18 sections that can be grouped into several larger ‘movements’, corresponding to an expanded sonata dialectic in terms of its change and return. The varying role of an antagonistic element recalls the quartet-writing of Elliott Carter; and if the Flammer lacks comparable wit or deftness, its seriousness of purpose cannot be gainsaid.

Those coming to his music for the first time should start with the Fifth String Quartet (2002) which, though it may follow a not dissimilar formal trajectory, is considerably shorter, with expressive contrasts easier to assimilate in real-time. The composer’s epigraph underlines its starting point in the deaths of friends and associates, but these are not embodied in the actual content, which exhibits increasing animation before returning to its original impassiveness.

Absorbing music that eschews easy concessions, though the Jade Quartet do all they can to project these works with vigour and insight. The SACD sound is as good as it gets in quartet terms but the composer’s own annotations are hardly accommodating to novice listeners.