Kairos’s previous Cerha release was anchored around the deep-listening fabric of his 1970s orchestral set Spiegel (A/10). It reminded us of a lowlier class of composer who, operating under the radar of those considered “essential” to the evolution of post-war composition – your Boulezes, Stockhausens, Ligetis, Kagels, Xenakises – could never achieve anything like whatever “big time” success contemporary music can bestow, a state of affairs that, maybe, had/has nothing to do with their music or ideas but everything to do with their reluctance to schmooze or to rabbit on to anyone who’ll listen about the magnitude of their genius.

Graham Greene once wrote about how writers wanting to comment on the world need to blend into the background; they need room to manoeuvre, observe, assess. Cerha’s like that. His 2009 ensemble piece Bruchstück, geträumt (“Fragment, dreamt”), like Spiegel, belongs to the same world that gave us the sound masses of Xenakis’s Metastasis and the micropolyphony of Ligeti’s Atmosphères, but heard from a distance, aesthetically and acoustically. In his programme note, Cerha discusses the perpetual problem – it’s a composer thing – of musical ideas losing their fizz somewhere between their initial conception and the writing down, an issue he cannily builds into his piece, with tones fluctuating at the margins, that dream broken into by incongruous tonalities and disembodied chorales. Under Klangforum Wien and Sylvain Cambreling it all slips down like butterscotch.

But the string trio Neun Bagatellen (2008) and Instants for orchestra (2006‑07) belong to a different world – a world perched between Webernesque complex simplicity, especially in the trio, and, in Instants, a brilliant, original, clean-cut complexity that’s well worth schmoozing about.