English-born Simon Andrews (b1958) was educated at Chichester Cathedral Chorister School, the Royal Academy of Music, Oxford University and the University of California, Berkeley. He is based currently in Pennsylvania and his music shows a clear American orientation in its sound world and sources of inspiration. This is perhaps most readily heard in the largest work on offer, the Abiquiu Trio, written after a holiday to New Mexico in 2012 and partly inspired by the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. (When composers admit to pictorial inspiration, it is a shame that record labels rarely illustrate it in the booklets or on the covers.)

There is a severity to Andrews’s writing that may not be to everyone’s taste but in the Abiquiu Trio, with its illustrative connections, it accords with the music’s expressive intent. So it is in the resonantly titled For the earth is hollow and I have touched the sky (alluding to a famous episode of the original Star Trek series). The orchestral music of Frank Zappa was another potent influence here, especially in the outer movements, which try to emulate Zappa’s rhythmic and harmonic energy. The title-track, And that moment when the bird sings, is different again, a clarinet quintet of lyrical impulse. Andrews is at his starkest in the two Violin Dialogues for violin and piano that open the programme, the first combative with different musics assigned to the two instruments, the second calmer and more unified though the sense of resolution is not entirely convincing.

The performances, with the composer as pianist except in the trios, are all well prepared and committed, including the two atmospheric songs at the disc’s centre, the one (‘My dove, my coney’) setting an early poem of Auden’s, the other (‘The heart has narrow banks’) Emily Dickinson.