This is an intelligently planned, finely played album for trombone and string quartet, part recital of contemporary music, part hypothesis of what chamber music featuring trombone from the 19th and early 20th centuries could have sounded like. The programme is arranged in pairs featuring an older work in arrangement, from Dowland to Bartók via Schumann, with a modern piece in some way connected to it. Modern popular musics are another connecting thread, brashly manifest in the first movement of Bryce Dessner’s Trombone Quintet (2021, a reduction of his Concerto of the previous year) and Chiel Meijering’s Rock that Trombone (a reworking of his Rock that Flute, 2008), which open and close proceedings. Rock music’s influence pervades Florian Magnus Maier’s invigorating Fadenschein (‘Threadbare’).

The first pairing casts the longest shadow, Nico Muhly’s sensitive arrangement of Dowland’s ‘I saw my lady weep’ (from The Second Book of Songs) followed by his own acute set of variations on the same melody, All Perfections Keep, blending Elizabethan melancholy and postmodern sensibility. The Bulgarian jazz composer Dimitar Bodurov’s way with two of Bartók’s pieces in Bulgarian rhythm from Mikrokosmos is fairly straightforward, though his own piece Inner Voice is anything but, a flight of folk-derived fancy, one of two works employing taped voices. The other is Syracuse Blues by Jacob ter Veldhuis (aka Jacob TV), a lament on the perils of overfishing counterpointed here with Fauré’s song of tragically lost love, ‘Le chanson du pêcheur’ (1865; it transfers to the trombone rather well in Steven Verhelst’s arrangement). The trombone version of Jacob TV’s piece was made at Jörgen van Rijen’s request but is one of several different incarnations of the 2009 orchestral original.

Van Rijen arranged Satie’s Gnossienne No 1, which loses none of its lilting charm as a quintet. More telling, however, is Geert van Keulen’s arrangement of the piano part of Schumann’s Fantasiestücke; the clarinet part, designed with Hindemithian cunning to be playable by violin or cello, transfers easily to the trombone. Here, finally, is what core trombone chamber music repertoire might have sounded like had circumstances been different, and van Rijen and the Alma Quartet are entirely convincing. It stands in marked contrast to the mesmerising stasis of Martijn Padding’s Schumann’s Last Procession (2008, later arranged).