Each of the five works presents a sound environment of wisps, susurrations, noises, and the odd pitched note. Key to the music’s success, though, is Czernowin’s subtle layering of these different instruments and sound types. The Quiet (2010) is a good example. Inspired, Czernowin says, by watching a blizzard at night through her window, it presents ‘an avalanche in reverse’: strictly speaking an impossible event, which is nonetheless evoked by different shades and densities of white noise passing around three orchestral groups. In this way the delicacy of a snowflake, magnified, attains the thundering of a snowstorm.

Similar paradoxes pop up in Zohar iver, Hebrew for ‘Blind Radiance’. Zohar Iver is, along with The Quiet, part of The Crescendo Trilogy, the last part of which is Esh, wherein the orchestra is joined by a countertenor (who sings drawn-out non-semantic tones). Moments of Zohar iver sound like a microphone turned to a jungle undergrowth, as marimba and woodblock trade rhythmic signals, high strings shimmer and woodwinds exude soft cries. This delicate approach suggests something like an ecology of sounds.

The disc closes with At the Fringe of Our Gaze. Commissioned by Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the piece begins with relatively traditional elements – legato strings, counterpoint, clear rhythms – which are then stripped away to reveal (as Czernowin puts it) what’s hidden beneath, ‘the undercurrent…which is where my music really starts’. A section of clusters, slow glissandos and rasping brass opens suddenly on to a terrific spatial expanse, like a forest clearing: reed-rustle of strings, drip-drip-drip of double bass, spume of percussion. It’s all quite impressive, and the instrumental filigree is precisely rendered by the five different orchestras.