Tamsin Waley-Cohen has built up a wide-ranging discography for Signum and now turns to the music of her sister Freya (b1989), whose increasingly varied catalogue here extends to a site-specific project. Permutations is the outcome of a collaboration between composer and violinist, along with designers Andrew Skulina and Finbarr O’Dempsey, for a work situated within a partitioned environment. Created over three years, Aldeburgh Music’s Jerwood Kiln Studio consists of six individual chambers, with each of the score’s pre-recorded violin parts housed in an acoustically variable setting. There are numerous antecedents (notably Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura), but Waley-Cohen’s work is notable for its economy of material – the (palindromic) series of intervals in the subject of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge the basis for what has been refashioned on this disc as a continuous sequence; those separate violin parts integrated into a ‘fantasy’ tracing an eventful course towards its decisive outcome.

It’s an imaginative and absorbing piece, rendered here with great finesse. It might perhaps have been worthwhile to include a DVD component featuring the installation as it was seen at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival, but the composer has described this at length in her booklet note (while a visual diary of its evolution can be accessed at permutations.co).

Also included is Unveil, a study in which material improvised when realising the larger work has been recast as successive variations that the soloist unfolds prior to revealing the original melody. Deftly executed, it makes an imaginative pendant to a fascinating overall concept.