Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, born in 1962 in Mannheim, chucks notes around like confetti. In his ensemble and instrumental works, the space and timbral differentiation between lines works in his favour; ripped lines jut out or cluster together in knowing chaos, and can be heard to do so.

But Mahnkopf wouldn’t be the first composer for whom transferring atonal polyphony to the piano has proved a stretch too far. True enough, Rhizom (1988-89) begins to make some sense when the realisation dawns that Mahnkopf is responding compositionally to the pianism of Glenn Gould: fleet-of-finger shingly counterpoint, dry pointillistic lines. Although his hunch that pushing layers of polyphony to extremes can generate ‘an internally schizophrenised simultaneity…of different temporal levels with diverging event complexities’ might have looked promising on paper, they cannot be heard in reality. Neos’s plastic, compacted sound picture doesn’t help matters – and Ermis Theodorakis certainly has the necessary chops to play what’s written. But Rhizom needs desperately to be thinned out and repointed – then, just maybe, hidden layers of meaning might emerge shell-shocked from a surface that, as it stands, sounds merely confused and overcooked.

Nor do things improve elsewhere. Beethoven-Kommentar (2004), a variation on one of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, has pretty much the same base sound world as everything else: shurely shome mishtake? I reckon the prevailing problem is that Mahnkopf has already made a conclusion about his material before he’s composed with it; only through the process of listening into material can music appear from behind the notes.