For those who know HK Gruber’s music-making primarily through his ground-breaking MOB art & tone ART ensemble, or his exuberant, genre-bending Frankenstein!!, the lyrical opening of the Cello Concerto (1989) will comes as something of a surprise. Indeed, there is much – on the surface – that might be thought conventional at first hearing, but while in many ways the concerto is the most traditionally based of the three works on this new disc, there is much beneath the busy, glitteringly scored surface that leaves tradition far behind. Cast in a single, variation-form movement, the concerto’s kaleidoscopic sequence of variants parade past the listener decked in an ever-changing array of light musics that prove increasingly irresistible. Robert Cohen throws off the solo part, written originally for Yo-Yo Ma, with warmth and vitality as required, though his tone is a little thin in the highest registers.

Zeitfluren (‘Timescapes’) of 2001 is a species of chamber concerto comprising two movements – one a spare, darkly haunting nocturne, the other a raucous, vibrant toccata – as different and as interconnected as the two sides of a bright, shiny coin. Perhaps the second span, ‘Another Day’, does overstay its welcome, but it is hard not to be swept up in its easy abandon; the Swedish Chamber Orchestra clearly were.

As Paul Driver points out in his notes, light or popular musics run like a skein throughout Gruber’s output and to illustrate this the final work, and the earliest, is an out-and-out tribute to American big band jazz and blues. Another diptych, Manhattan Broadcasts (1962-64) joyously frolics around depictions of New York’s Tammany Hall and Radio City; in the latter, Gruber makes the Swedish Chamber Orchestra really swing. All great fun, and masterfully achieved.