Though Ge Gan-Ru was raised and educated in Shanghai where he would discover the Western avant garde (Stockhausen, Cage and Crumb), like Tan Dun and Bright Sheng, upon moving to the US he would adopt a hybrid style bringing together traditional Chinese elements with a style associated with American modernists such as Copland and Bernstein. It was during his period of overseas study that, homesick, he would experience recurring “dreams of the street scenes and sounds of old Shanghai”, which led to a wish to compose music that would bring a coalescence of East with West. And Shanghai Reminiscences is the musical realisation of that wish.

Opening this large-scale work we hear the chanting monks and bells of his beloved Jing An temple, placed within an emotional and harmonic milieu akin to Bernstein’s Symphony No 2 (The Age of Anxiety). Woven into this ingenious work, the listener also discovers elements of traditional Peking opera and folk tunes set against the more familiar (for us) sound world of the Western violin.

The other piece on this disc is Butterfly Overture, a tribute to his first teacher at the Shanghai Conservatory, Chen Gang who composed the Butterfly Lovers violin concerto – still the...