In The Natural Word (2019) for ensemble, Asian-American composer Anthony Cheung explores the rum idea of creating musical illustrations of closed captions (like you see on Netflix: ‘faint rumbling’ and so on). Although listening blind we don’t have access to the closed captions in question, Cheung’s intensely colourful, exquisitely wrought ensemble-writing lets us imagine them. Rattles and scrapes on woodblocks segue into chiming triangle and into microtonal high winds: there is dazzling control across the instrumental gamut (with equally dazzling performances throughout the album). Restraint is key: Cheung rarely over-eggs the material, framing with silence the sound heard, be it the faint click-clacking of a clarinet’s keys or the buzzing decay of an overplucked harp. Eventually, the contrasting episodes morph into a more continuous texture of swelling, quasi-spectral rising and falling scales. The instrumental variety gives The Natural Word the character of a concerto for orchestra.

Cheung’s music generally fuses Francophile lush orchestration with Rihm like febrile polyphony. The opening of null and void resembles Messiaen in its wind chords, yet it also incorporates microtonal percussion sonorities from Partch instruments. The music was composed to accompany the film Stump the Guesser, and its dramatic force makes it like a contemporary symphonic poem: the wah-wah trumpet, swooning horn and crashing cymbals press you to invent a corresponding drama in your mind.

Alluding to the wire-mesh sculptures of artist Ruth Asawa, Cheung’s piano concerto A line can go anywhere explores the piano as a wired mechanical box. Slow microtonal descents are a recurring motif, staggered across instruments, and a just-intonation Rhodes keyboard adds colour. The first movement presents an opening cell gradually becoming more complex, like wire unfurling, the opening staccato and pizzicato flourishes eventually leading to dense microtonal textures. In the quieter second movement, dense passages transition to and from bare ones imperceptibly. In the thrilling third movement, a high piano trill motif is like a high-wire routine setting off a chain reaction of tremolo pyrotechnics throughout the ensemble, from rattling triangle to glissando violin. An intriguing album fusing the traditional and the contemporary.