On this revelatory release, Yaara Tal – inspired by Tobias Bleek’s In the Frenzy of the Twenties – 1923: Music in a Year of Extremes – gathers up works written in (or around) 1923. It’s not a greatest hits compendium; most of the music, in fact, is little known. Rather, it’s an attempt to distil the underlying spirit of a tumultuous year.

Such a project, of course, requires some principle of selection. Here, the primary focus (nearly half of the collection) falls on 1923 as the year that 12-note music came of age. It’s a viable perspective and it’s especially enlightening as exemplified in this survey, which aims to remind us that there were competing 12-note ‘systems’ at the time. Tal thus offers music not only by Schoenberg (who, in fact, gets the shortest block of time) and his student Eisler, but also by the less familiar pioneers Josef Matthias Hauer and Fritz Heinrich Klein, who deployed the fundamental principle quite differently.

Still, for all its illumination, this emphasis does occlude other crucial elements of 1923. It was, for example, the year that Nikolay Roslavets founded the Soviet Association for Contemporary Music, nourishing an avant-garde with substantially different aesthetics. None of that tradition shows up. Nor do the modernisms of Busoni or Ives. A different presupposition about what’s central would have produced a different sense of the spirit of the time.

There’s only, however, so much you can do in 70 minutes, and what’s included is dizzying in its range. Tal, for instance, deftly follows three sparse Janáček epigrams with Klein’s dense, clattering 1921 Die Maschine. Similarly, Bloch’s uncharacteristically restrained Nirvana (an evocative, nearly static work that never ascends above mezzo-forte) runs into Eisler’s hyperactive Second Sonata.

Best known for her collaborations with Andreas Groethuysen (who in fact joins her in the Klein), Tal nimbly navigates the shifts in stylistic terrain. Whether in the dreaminess of Delius’s post-Fauréan miniatures, in the relentlessness of the hard-edged Klein, in the intimacy of the Mompou or in the ironic cheek of the stylised dances by Jaques-Dalcroze, she’s entirely in tune with the music. She’s especially impressive in the Hauer. These puzzling miniatures have neither dynamic nor tempo markings, giving the performer tremendous interpretative latitude, but also tremendous responsibility. Tal’s choices seem totally convincing.

The sound is solid and Bleek’s booklet notes provide valuable context. An offbeat but refreshing collection.