Friedrich Cerha, born in Vienna in 1926, is the doyen of Austrian composers, with a huge catalogue of music to his name. Cerha also trained as a violinist and most of the works in this anthology of his violin pieces were written for himself to play in the 1940s and ’50s, when he was still active as a performer.

It begins with one of his first surviving compositions, the Hindemith-like First Violin Sonata of 1947. Stravinsky was another early influence before Cerha found the voice that made him Austria’s leading avant-garde composer. Two later works, from almost half a century on, complete the stylistic trajectory. One of them, the Sechs Stücke für Violine Solo, was written expressly for the violinist on this CD, Ernst Kovacic, a friend of the composer for many years.