Thirty-something British composer Luke Bedford (b1978) has a nice line in surrealistic titles. Of the five works on this disc, all composed over the past decade or so, only Chiaroscuro uses a straightforward metaphor to do with a painting’s inflections of contrasting colours, echoed in the music’s subtle inflections of pitch and rhythm. The other titles’ connection with the actual music can be more difficult to explicate.

Bedford is not especially concerned to continue the engagement with expressionism to be found in the work of some of his most successful contemporaries. But this doesn’t necessarily make him more postmodern than modernist. There’s an expressive immediacy, a forthrightness whose small-scale repetitions suggest some affinity with minimalism; but this is often countered, as in By the Screen in the Sun at the Hill on the Gold, with dramatic, fragmented eruptions that strengthen the music’s profile and enrich its formal design. The one vocal work included is particularly appealing. Or voit tout en aventure – meaning something like ‘everything is out of control’ – sets ancient texts about music that lament the loss of tunefulness and consonance. Bedford’s settings are very direct and well disciplined but his luminously dissonant harmony offers a persuasive case for allowing music to evolve, to be modern and even – to a degree – challenging. A similar simplicity – sometimes raw, as with the open strings of Wonderful Two-Headed Nightingale – is to be found throughout but always (in admirably polished and persuasive performances) with a distinctive blend of energy and eloquence.