Orlando Cela brings an adventurer’s spirit to ‘Shadow Etchings’, his disc of new music for flute. Each work requires the ability to master extended techniques of often daunting intricacy, from sudden extremes of range and violent eruptions to hums, grunts and assorted pyrotechnics. Cela does so with exceptional dexterity and colour, sustaining interest even when the music becomes amorphous.

Debussy’s Syrinx makes a crucial appearance in Jean-Patrick Besingrad’s Le soupir du rouseau dans les bras de vent, which expands in numerous sonic directions as the flautist plays multiphonics, flutter-tongued passages and windy flourishes. In Lou Bunk’s Winter Variations, a piano emits staccato chords and fading sonorities – inspired by John Cage’s Winter Music – as the flautist (alternating between alto flute and piccolo) produces icy fragments.

Cela teams with an electronic recording of himself playing and vocalising in Robert Gross’s otherworldly Variations on a Schenker Graph of Gesualdo. The theme of the folk tune ‘Tom Dooley’ forms the basis for Dana Kaufman’s Hang Down Your Head, which finds the flautist singing, sometimes in Tuvan throat fashion, amid a spectrum of whirlwind variations.

The disc’s titular work, in Greek, is Stratis Minakakis’s Skiagrafies II, three short movements of subtle interactions between flute and piano resonance (played by the composer). Edward Maxwell Dulaney’s A Turning Inwards employs all sorts of techniques to mystifying effect, while the ‘inner struggle as an artist’ that Ziteng Ye depicts in his Self-Portrait gives Cela a vast expressive canvas on which to paint the composer’s compelling, Eastern-tinged musings.