Originally set up as an online database, the Budapest Music Centre quickly established its own record label to enable people to hear Hungarian music more readily. An interesting feature of this release in its contemporary catalogue is the inclusion of silent tracks of varying durations (up to 1'27") between each piece. When CDs displaced LPs it became much easier for listeners to re-programme the artists’ ordering of tracks, but no one bothered much about the intervals between them. Evidently Barnabás Dukay (like Mahler?) hopes for some degree of control over the time we reflect on each piece before moving on to the next.

In these works he seems to be meditating on the nebulous nature of time and even place. Light, mist and wind can be seen and felt, but none can be grasped. Dukay’s music, accordingly, ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes, rarely consolidating into anything very concrete.

Mist Hovering, based on a melancholy chant-like melody, appears in four versions, for quartets of violas, tenors, altos and marimbas. Initially homophonic, when the melody refracts into simple but highly effective counterpoint the phrases swirl in languorous free-fall. Each version shimmers with a different colour, and the tremolo techniques in the instrumental versions create eerily human-sounding effects.

The crystalline textures of ...like the Wind recall the Second Viennese tradition. Setting Sun, with its unsettling layers of shifting, see-sawing figures, is paradoxically the busiest yet most static piece. In Incandescence the three violins, three violas and three cellos achieve remarkable, deceptively un-stringlike sounds.

All première recordings, these performances reveal the subtle, self-effacing beauty of Dukay’s music.