In this typically provocative compilation, ECM producer Manfred Eicher doesn’t simply present a sequence of three separate, well-contrasted compositions: rather, by minimising the separation between them, he devises a new, continuous composition that has quite different qualities from the three components considered separately. As a consequence, Brahms’s role is not so much that of ‘the ghost of music past’, a strange remnant framed by the living essence of contemporary, modernist identities. While Brahms’s message is that of timeless tonal truth, as alive today as it was on its creation in 1891, the two living composers come across as seeking something positively negative: for Salvatore Sciarrino, a title borrowed from a book defending euthanasia fits a music of haunting evanescence, struggling for breath as it achieves a precariously refined eloquence, while for Gérard Pesson, in a piece he defines as a ‘filtrage’ of Brahms’s early Ballade, Op 10 No 4, the march-like features of the original are transformed into the kind of bleak but hypnotic meditation through which much new music communicates its principled unease with present-day cultural conventions.

The quirky simplicity of Sciarrino’s vocabulary, far from upbeat minimalist exuberance, serves an elegy dispersed between low and very high sounds, occasionally disrupted with aggressive interjections that are inevitably short-lived; a haunting vision superbly conveyed in Reto Bieri’s uncannily controlled playing. After Sciarrino, the Brahms Quintet (in a very close-focus acoustic) seems almost oppressively fervent and refined, until the insistently melancholic tone it shares with all the music on the disc asserts its own distinctive presence, evolving into a battle with a spirit of rhapsodic defiance that motivates the starkness of the quintet’s final B minor cadence. That starkness then resonates through the fractured lyricism of Pesson’s Nebenstück, an ironic title probably best translated as ‘piece about nearness’, though in truth the distance from its Brahmsian source, and the subsequent, poignant disintegration of its identity, is what this powerful, inventively textured music best conveys.