This remarkable sequence of compositions by Michael Finnissy (b1943) has several special qualities. The framing performances of different versions of Alternative Readings (2002), which gives the disc its title, are purely instrumental, but the programme as a whole is dominated by the arrestingly opulent voice of Lotte Betts-Dean. The daughter of the Australian composer Brett Dean, she has all the commitment and confidence of a contemporary-music insider, and the operatic richness of characterisation she conveys makes for a perfect fit with the tantalising starkness and insistence found in many of Finnissy’s more recent compositions, so different from the florid, volatile textures of his earlier music.

The centrally placed highlight, and the longest work, is Wisdom (2020), a mesmerising response to the still raw realities of pandemic and lockdown – and there could be affinities here with his much more explicitly documentary approach to the Aids epidemic in Unknown Ground (1989-90). Wisdom ends with one of Finnissy’s most beguiling instrumental inspirations, featuring the Marsyas Trio’s flautist Helen Vidovich. But Betts-Dean’s initial projection of the work’s extraordinary range of allusive texts, from aboriginal folk poetry to fabled figures from European literature (Victor Frankenstein, Robinson Crusoe) culminates in the depths of despair: ‘Alone, I no longer see the sun or stars. Light, feeling and sense pass away, lost in darkness and distance.’ As Wisdom passes from accompanied arioso to wordless instrumental music, it may be possible to sense a degree of consolation despite what is lost, as Vidovich suggests in her notes with the disc. But this is, at best, grasping at straws, and the dark inevitability that Betts-Dean’s vibrant vocal colour casts over the entire composition fixes Wisdom’s predominant mood, despite the absence of singing at the end.

The shorter vocal works included range in date from the youthful forays of Oxford in 1817 (1966‑67) to a trio of responses to Schubert/Goethe settings, An den Mond (2021‑22), and the cause of variety is further served by the inclusion of two short but fraught-sounding instrumental pieces, June (2013). The overall effect is to offer principled resistance to the convention of a CD recital sequence that invites continuous listening from beginning to end. Music as intense and involving as Wisdom makes the prospect of moving on immediately to anything else – in this case the two Salomé songs – difficult if not impossible to contemplate. It may also take even the most practised contemporary-music listeners a while to weigh up the effect of the two framing performances of Alternative Readings, an unedited ‘live version’ and a ‘studio version’. The timings are virtually identical, and although Vidovich finds them ‘surprisingly different’, this listener has so far remained more hung up on the surprising differences between Alternative Readings in both versions and the latter part of the first movement of Bruckner’s First Symphony, to which it ‘refers’. More provocation, perhaps, but the persuasive assurance of these performers and their technical assistants is consistently of the highest calibre.