Quite often you can listen to programmatic music – where the composer tries to convey an extra-musical narrative – without realising its programmatic purpose until you discover from the programme notes or liner notes what it’s all about. Here the album title Portraits gives you a clue. But portraits of what? It’s only when you read the CD booklet you learn it’s concerned with things existential: how is it possible human sensitivity and creativity coexist alongside unspeakable brutality?; what is happiness today?; and so on.

Bałdych draws on poems and letters from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and Simon Laks’ book Auschwitz Games, for inspiration but in truth he need not have gone back that far. How about now? Unsurprisingly minor keys get a good look in. Bałdych and his quintet unite effectively in well executed protest against warfare in a call for peace in this world. Some hope, but it’s better than looking the other way. A lot of these songs have a strong folkloric feel, haunting melodies that have endured down the ages against mankind’s temporal existence that in the space of a decade or so various assorted nutters seem to find their way to power and well and truly really mess things up for the rest of us.