BUBBLY one moment, faintly bruised the next: Anna Clyne’s Strange Loops doesn’t so much begin as set off in motion, looping back on itself with the kind of sly confidence that makes you lean in.

According to a new report, clarinettist Mark Van de Wiel is the featured performer on a clarinet quintets album with Soloists of the Philharmonia on Signum, bringing together music by Clyne, Ruth Gipps and Weber. It’s the sort of programme that promises colour and contrast, and it opens with a piece built on the pleasures of returning—changed.

Van de Wiel was principal clarinet of the Philharmonia from 2000 until 2025, and during that span he gave the UK premiere of Clyne’s Strange Loops. That title nods to Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 bestseller Gödel, Escher, Bach, using the idea of a cyclic system where you travel up or down through layers and suddenly find yourself back where you started.

Clyne composed Strange Loops during lockdown, and the writing plays out that concept in sound. The music is described as klezmer-inflected, with loops that multiply and mutate, slipping into syncopations and little sidesteps—yet it still reaches what’s called a satisfying conclusion. In other words: restlessness, but with a destination.

As an opener, it lands as buoyant but bittersweet, and the performance is characterised as meticulously realised. Alongside Van de Wiel, the players named are violinists Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay and Fiona Cornall, violist Nicholas Bootiman and cellist Karen Stephenson—an intimate line-up that can turn a single twist of rhythm into something like a narrative beat.

There’s a particular pleasure in a concept album that doesn’t need a single spoken word to feel like it’s telling you something. When a “strange loop” works, it doesn’t trap you in circles; it makes the return feel earned—and that’s a classy trick for any musician to pull off.