In live performance, Theseus Game (2002-03) offers clear visual contrasts: an ensemble of 30 players has two conductors, and there’s a central space at the front of the platform for the succession of soloists who emerge from the ensemble. This chain of solo melody might represent the magic thread, given to Theseus by Ariadne, which enables him to escape from the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Or it might suggest Theseus’s heroic determination to survive in an hostile environment, a survival which remains constantly in doubt.

That second interpretation seems the most appropriate to a recording (of the work’s first performance) in which distinctions clear to the eye are far less evident to the ear. Here background and foreground, solos and ensemble, converge in a titanic struggle whose rhetoric occasionally strays from drama into melodrama: and while the exuberance of the solo lines might hint at the playful aspects of a game, the atmosphere is too tense, the texture too dense, to suggest anything more athletic than the most strenuous kind of gladiatorial combat. Or perhaps the title indicates that Theseus is ‘game’ to fight for his survival, whatever the odds?

Earth Dances (1985-86) makes an appropriate coupling. Here, too, there is opposition between a volcanic life force of jagged rhythms and harsh harmonies and aspirations to a gentler, more melodic world of finer human feelings. In this, its third recording, Pierre Boulez leads a measured, alert traversal of the score’s labyrinthine highways and byways, and a boldly delineated sound-picture ensures that the music’s apocalyptic evolution comes over as devastatingly as ever. Listeners might have been helped by a sequence of timed cues to particular musical events in the notes, at least in relation to what seems like a basic division between the first 17 minutes and the even more implacable remainder. But, with or without such aids to comprehension, Earth Dances demands total surrender; as the music unwinds to its end, spasms of the seismic dance stand in the way of any comforting sense of fulfilment, or resolution.

To coincide with the composer’s 70th birthday, the Royal Academy of Music has released a sequence of Birtwistle recordings made by staff and students in 2001. Five Distances for wind quintet (1992) has been recorded before, and this version risks substituting a generalised resonance for a strong sense of actual separation between the players. Yet it’s very well played and persuasively shaped. Distance and resonance are even more basic to The Silk House Tattoo (1993) with its circling, echoing trumpets kept in line by a peremptory drummer, and to 17 Tate Riffs (2000), Birtwistle’s characteristically ritualised response to a commission for the opening ceremony of Tate Modern, with 15 players spread around the cavernous Turbine Hall. No recording can match the far-flung aural vistas of the original location, but this one is well worth having as a reminder of how – even on the smallest timescale – Birtwistle can hint at the wider formal perspectives and grander mythic themes which form his usual terrain.