Thierry Pécou, the 40-something French composer and pianist, named his Ensemble Zellig after the main protagonist in Woody Allen’s 1983 film Zelig. Why he spelt it with an extra “l” I’m not sure but Allen’s character – who floats through time, effortlessly merging into history where he’s photographed next to Al Capone, Herbert Hoover and Charlie Chaplin – is an apt metaphor for Pécou’s swerve through styles, his dishonestly honest reimagining of history.

Other reviews I’ve read describe Pécou as a stylistic chameleon but that’s not quite right. Neither Symphonie du Jaguar (2002) for orchestra, five female voices and the clarinet, trombone, violin, cello soloists from Ensemble Zellig, or Vague de pierre (2007) for large orchestra, suggest a composer subsuming his personality inside postmodernism’s nondescript smash-and-grab. Symphonie du Jaguar plunders Meso-American mythology, where the jaguar symbolised the sun’s journey towards the core of the Earth, with each movement and instrumental soloist representing a stage along that journey.

Musically, Pécou serves up a meta-collage: a snatch of Messiaen’s Turangalîla becomes a tipping-point for the collision (sometimes fusion) of primary colour tonalities and inchoate melodic fragments that dissolve into red-hot sonic magma. The voices intone and chatter, and Pécou nudges his instrumental soloists away from cosy classical politeness with resourceful extended techniques.

Vague de pierre, anchored around Chinese philosophy, is brooding and monolithic, and both pieces – performed by an orchestra clearly loving it – stretch tradition while invoking picaresque fantasy worlds characteristic of earlier French music: Rameau, Berlioz, Pierre Henry and Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. But Pécou – he’s the wizard.