I’ve written before about Bruno Maderna’s Piano Concerto (1/11), my sense of it as a radical synthesis of everything good that was happening in composed music during 1959: the calm rationality of serial control upset by indeterminacy and chance. Maderna wasn’t the only composer operating along similar lines. Exactly contemporary with his concerto, Mauricio Kagel’s loose-leaf Transición II for piano, percussion and electronics arguably pushed the systemic absurdities of filtering 12 tone thinking through randomness further and deeper. But the unique achievement of Maderna’s piece is that, entirely typically, his innovations repainted a traditional canvas: piano with orchestra; therefore a Piano Concerto.

The work has already been well documented on record. In 2010 Neos released an archival recording of the premiere conducted by Maderna with David Tudor on piano (7/11), and I’ve long admired Emanuele Arciuli and Sandro Gorli’s 1998 performance on Stradivarius. But this new version – Markus Bellheim and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Tamayo – elevates the piece to a new plain, playing out its contradictions as eloquent sonic theatre.

Long passages for orchestra alone are cracked into by hefty piano cadenzas and only gradually out of this collision of materials does a recognisable concerto form piece itself together. But Bellheim stresses an even giddier ambiguity – the ‘music’ of the piano tested against the ‘sound’ of the piano, as tautly organised counterpoint is obliged to inhabit the same space as inside-of-the-instrument rumblings and, at one climactic peak, the lid of the piano being slammed.

In Maderna’s Violin Concerto, written a decade later, the violinist appears only after an extended sequence of spaghetti-junction brass fanfares disappear inside hectic string-writing, which itself is overlaid with melismatic, galloping tuned percussion – itself stopped by a sudden pure-toned woodwind chorale – each stratum rotating within its own time frame. When the violin eventually enters with dislocating melodic lines, a similar process begins, familiar from the Piano Concerto, of the material needing to learn how to assemble itself as a concerto. Mission accomplished, the piece simply stops. But Zehetmair and Tamayo keep the journey alive and urgent.