- This week I’m reviewing such a serious, formal record that I wonder how to even begin. My music-writing skills were honed on bands and beats. How do I bring them to bear on a project that the label presser describes as ‘the first of a sophisticated series of projects of modern classical music’?

This makes sense because something interesting has been happening to ‘classical’ music for a while now. The age-old figure of the ‘composer’ sits comfortably in an age of bedroom music, and art music is increasingly finding new audiences beyond the walls of the conservatory.

All too often, the classical is used as a by-word for contemplative gentleness. Think of the droning ambience of Bing & Ruth, or the countless Erik Satie-influenced piano records put out by Erased Tapes. This work is gorgeous, sure, but it’s far from challenging.

So by comparison, there is something almost arrestingly terse about Polish composer Kuba Kapsa’s new release on the eternally forward-thinking German label Denovali.

Vantdraught No. 1 is meticulously patterned. It’s a dark, energetic forty minutes of chamber music that churns and roils, continually circling back in on itself with startling turbulence. As we might expect from a pianist with avant-garde jazz and noise leanings, this is challenging.

The key to understanding this record can be found in the work of Steve Reich, particularly the iconic American composer’s dizzying Music for 18 Musicians and Different Trains. The influence of Reich and likeminded twentieth-century minimalists is evident in Kapsa’s rich instrumentation — a ten-piece ensemble of interlocking strings, mallet percussion and piano — as well as in the lively, dense, almost machinelike pace of the four movements.

The concept itself breaks no new ground, but it’s executed with confidence and panache. The production is crisp but perhaps too cold, the kind of thing you might expect from a Deutsche Grammophon or Mercury Classics release.

In fact, even at its most beautiful and dynamic, there is something strangely airless and claustrophobic about Vantdraught’s relentless staccato polyrhythms, a creeping unease that Kapsa expertly maintains throughout his whole album.

It’s like a more violent cousin to some of Pat Metheny’s more composerly work, such as First Circle or The Way Up, which is a sentence I never thought I’d find myself typing. Vantdraught No. 1 also fits surprisingly well alongside some of the more outré metal that Denovali puts out. It’s a bold move from the label, releasing such a tense and unadorned classical composition, but it’s a resounding success.

- Henry Reese.