The University of Manchester’s music department has become a fertile composing ground, its admirable quartet in residence clearly an inspiration. Reeves’s brief, compellingly intricate Quartets Nos 1 and 2 both (astonishingly) explore links between aquatic organisms and ensembles such as this. Richard Whalley’s Interlocking Melodies is a stylish, Ligeti-inspired study in whole-tone figuration. John Casken’s self-reflective, eight-minute Choses en Moi has a vigour vaguely Viennese, while Philip Grange’s Ghosts of Great Violence, evoking the Somme battlefields, is a full-scale essay in part inspired, he says, by John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed.