For Harrison Birtwistle to change the title of Pulse Sampler to ‘Danse sacrale’ would suggest an inappropriately literal homage to The Rite of Spring. But it would convey more of this music’s remarkable blend of ferocious energy and lyrical lament, especially as recorded here in its revised version (2018), where the percussion part is much more diverse than in the original version (1981). This performance by Melinda Maxwell and Richard Benjafield has all the knife-edge intensity of an unbroken ‘take’. As a recording it’s a tribute to the sympathetic ambience of London’s King’s Place, used for three days in January 2021 to put together this outstanding collection of Birtwistle’s later chamber music, which also serves as a reminder of the productive influence the Nash Ensemble has had over the composer’s output, especially in recent years.

Ever since calling his Op 1 Refrains and Choruses rather than ‘Wind Quintet’, Birtwistle has been rethinking traditional compositional genres to bring out their inherent ambiguity; and calling his most recent piece Duet for Eight Strings rather than something more conventional such as ‘Duo for viola and cello’, gives a wry, personal twist to music that dramatises duality in a variety of ways. This is one of the composer’s ‘in memoriam’ pieces, its tone increasingly elegiac as it moves towards its understated ending. As often with Birtwistle, allusions to song and dance interact, while, on a more technical level, the refined interplay of symmetries and hierarchies is as vivid as ever.

All the music here retains a freshness and focus belying the composer’s age; it’s a long way from a mere rehashing of familiar ways of doing things. In strong contrast to its companions, the single-movement Piano Trio sounds unusually expansive and resonant, perhaps in conscious tribute to its dedicatee, Birtwistle’s student friend Alexander Goehr – as committed a follower of Schoenberg as Birtwistle was of Stravinsky. But the relish with which the composer addresses generic traditions doesn’t prevent him from adopting a manner that can suggest parody as much as celebration. The three players engage in a drama that involves multiple roles, and this meticulous performance offers musical play-acting – sometimes melodramatic, sometimes restrained – as the finest of fine arts.

As in Duet, the Trio’s ceremonial, celebratory spirit can be spontaneously lyrical as well as sombrely assertive, and the building of cogent forms from a dialogue between such diverse modes of expression is also to be heard in the Oboe Quartet. Birtwistle underlines the separate phases of work – on what eventually became a four-movement composition – by making the appearance of shared materials between movements into a ritual that is, typically, as unaffectedly emotional as it is technically austere. At the end, the separation of oboe from strings signals that, even in chamber music, there are fundamental differences between instruments that cannot be definitively resolved.