Aficionados of contemporary music will already be familiar with the name Robert Carl as a writer. He has authored extensive reviews for Fanfare and a recent, thought-provoking collection of essays on the challenges faced by 21st-century composers. As an exemplar of the latter, Carl has been steadily building an admirable body of work that convincingly balances an unlikely amalgam of influences. These include the tradition of American Transcendentalism, the unflinching rigour of Xenakis (one of his teachers), and the backwards glances encouraged by a postmodern aesthetic.

The four orchestral pieces gathered here date from between 2012 and 2016. They exhibit Carl’s mature synthesis of far-ranging interests into a unique sound world that is recognisably contemporary while aiming for a timeless sublimity – the kind of transportive experience for which our era has so little patience.

Since the millennium, Carl has experimented with a manipulation of the harmonic series to craft a personal, deeply expressive language. His parallel exploration of the sculptural aspects of a composition results in a preoccupation with the phenomenology of musical space – with giving sounds, in the composer’s words, ‘room to breathe’, so that ‘even dense and complex textures do not feel cloudy and self-cancelling. Instead, they vibrate.’

Carl draws on memories of landscapes that have impressed him, but his musical images coalesce and recede with an intuitive pacing rather than the narrative linearity of conventional programme music. The longest work here, Symphony No 5 (Land), transforms the experience of frequent car journeys across the central prairie of the US and ascending the Rocky Mountains into a stunning display of music’s metaphorical power. White Heron, inspired by a visit to the Florida Keys, is a particularly attractive feat of musical imagism. Written for string orchestra, Rocking Chair Serenade finds astonishing variety in the basic gesture of ‘inhalation/exhalation’ suggested by an oscillating rocker envisioned across multiple landscapes. What’s Underfoot, a sombre memorial, marries its carefully wrought process with a sense of organic inevitability that is reminiscent of John Luther Adams.

Gil Rose leads the BMOP musicians in sensitively paced performances. Their accounts breathe naturally with the music, tracing Carl’s arresting harmonic visions with uncompromising focus.