You ideally need two reviewers for this. Firstly the ‘stern, sober mind’, once evoked in a New Yorker column by Andrew Porter, that resists George Crumb’s music ‘almost on principle – as if contemporary music had no business to sound so pretty, and can’t be any good if it does’. The second, perhaps Mr Porter himself, to ‘surrender to its seductions gladly…a personal repertory of precise, picturesque and captivating sounds’. Maybe a third also, to recall why pieces like Makrokosmos seemed so liberating and delightful 30 years ago: they are simple yet mysterious, as remote from minimalism as from the hard-line avant-garde, often closer to a magic spell than anything you expect to encounter at a concert.

But Andrew Russo and his colleagues effectively take the place of that third critic, revelling in the strange, pictorially evocative sounds that can be drawn from exploiting the resonance of a skilfully amplified piano, from gently strumming or dramatically plucking its strings, from chanting or whispering into it and (in the case of Vox balaenae) from using extended techniques not merely to imitate the voices of whales but to evoke their habitat, to reflect on their antiquity and to point up kinships between their music and that of the East.

This sometimes stern and mostly sober mind does not in the least object to modern music sounding pretty, but it does sometimes long for rather more to happen, for a swifter rate of change, even for change itself. And, to be brutal, if I want Christmas music with modal ostinati I’d rather have straight Messiaen than Messiaen so heavily watered as he is here.

But Crumb’s sounds are indeed ‘precise, picturesque and captivating’, and there is undoubtedly a public for music that invites contemplation rather than stern and sober analytic listening. I doubt very much whether that public has diminished since the 1970s, and for them this beautifully recorded disc will be an ideal introduction to Crumb’s hypnotic (or soporific: try it and choose your own adjective) world.