Jane Stanley: Cerulean Orbits album review – music with an ear for texture and economy

Five tautly written chamber works make up this first portrait recording of music by the Glasgow-based Australian composer Jane Stanley , all crafted with an ear for texture, economy and purposeful energy. The title track has violin and piano circling each other almost aggressively, maintaining their own timbral qualities and spiralling towards an exhausted truce; Helix Reflection, the only previously recorded work, is a friendlier dance for flute and clarinet, who bend their pitches and mix their timbres. Suite, written in 2014 and slightly extended for this recording, traverses a strikingly wide yet coherent range of musical colour over its eight miniature movements. Oneiroi is a 25-minute dreamscape in which the notes are Stanley’s but the precise way in which they unfold and intertwine is down to the six players, in the moment. All are sparkily put across by members of the Red Note Ensemble.

Perhaps the most immediate work is The Indifferent, a new song cycle. Written for The Hermes Experiment, it uses the ensemble’s distinctive lineup – clarinet, harp and double bass, with Héloïse Werner ’s open, direct soprano on top – to create a seashore meditation in which Judith Bishop’s words interact with a vivid sonic suggestion of the wide sky and the push and pull of the waves.