Erika Fox – like Alexander Goehr, four years her senior – came to England with her family as a small child in the 1930s, to escape Nazi persecution. She has declared that ‘my music owes almost nothing to Western musical tradition, and almost everything to my childhood memories of Jewish liturgical chant and fragments of Hasidic melody’. Nevertheless, the four compositions on this disc, written between 1980 and 2005, have a much wider expressive profile than such purely ethnic aspects might suggest; and with that profile comes impressive technical resourcefulness. It’s all a long way from mere idiosyncrasy.

Take Quasi una cadenza, a 13-minute piece for clarinet, horn and piano, which manages to transform the expansive sense of freedom that cadenzas in concertos often display into a shapely structure that builds to a powerfully dramatic conclusion. The material, conveying an engaging variety of moods, has the kind of rhapsodic spontaneity that, in the earlier Paths Where the Mourners Tread, leads to a certain looseness of form. But even there – the title is a line from Philip Larkin – the blend of the elegiac and the abrasive is compelling, and very well conveyed by these performers in a recording that catches the evolving interactions of the ensemble with vivid immediacy.

You might expect a composition called On Visiting Stravinsky’s Grave at San Michele to intensify the elegiac tone but it is launched with a positively jaunty idea – the composer calls it ‘bold and direct’ – as if to encapsulate that special Stravinskian energy and confidence which Fox has found inspiring. Here too an unambiguously positive spirit is at work, and the formal plan of bringing initial contrasts gradually closer together, so that difference transforms into connectedness, is particularly satisfying.

The last two works both have wartime associations. In Malinconia militaire, from 2003, Fox channels her concerns over the Iraq war through music inspired by a poem called ‘Webern Opus 4’ by Amelia Rosselli, an Italian writer and musician whose father and uncle were murdered for their resistance to Mussolini, while Café Warsaw 1944 references a poem by Czesław Miłosz mourning friends who did not survive the Second World War. In both, Fox does justice to these potent poetic resonances in textures that move persuasively between haunting laments and vigorous affirmations – and the use of percussion in Café Warsaw 1944 is especially telling. On this evidence, more of Erika Fox’s music on disc would be very welcome.