“Yi Feng (‘Lost Style’) by Ge Gan‑ru is China’s first avant-garde work” – that’s the striking claim of this remarkable composer-portrait CD. Ge Gan-ru (b1954) matured as a composer during the Cultural Revolution. His solo cello piece Yi Feng is from 1983, the year he relocated to New York to study composition, and grabs back a right to think freely from party control.

The work channels coolly controlled anger and defiance into positive creative ends. The cello is overhauled sonically by retuning in fourths an octave lower than is customary, which creates a strategic compositional paradox – the cello can now relate both to the Western avant-garde and to the feral sounds of indigenous Chinese string and percussion instruments. The range of timbres and articulations Ge provokes is unheralded. Cage’s prepared piano pieces perhaps created some precedent, but the gestural freshness and sheer liberated wildness of these punky percussive tones invents a radical new syntax for the cello. Cellist Frank Su Huang intrepidly throws himself into the unknown.

The other works have Peking opera as their source. Four Studies of Peking Opera (2003) for prepared piano and string quartet is a response to the distinctive sonic quality of the music, with tactile string glissandi imitating nasal vocal inflections. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! (2006) was designed around the talents of toy piano specialist Margaret Leng Tan, who also sings as she plays a battery of supplementary toy instruments. Described as a “Peking opera-inspired melodrama”, the work is a brilliant re-imagining and a unique meeting of minds between composer and performer.