Holst, Tippett, Birtwistle – British composers in the modern era have achieved great things with the kind of dialogues between the mechanistic and the organic that have become causes for concern as well as celebration during recent times. From the younger generations, Tansy Davies (b1973) is a distinctive contributor to the genre, so to label this disc ‘Nature’ tells only half the story, as the very un-pastoral character of her composition with that title underlines.

The earliest (2012) of the four works included, Nature is a chamber concerto, the pianist accompanied by just 10 other players. Davies speaks of the ‘nature’ of the solo part (and indeed of the whole texture) as involving a ‘wild’ search for higher things, and along with this Pan-like quality there is a broader sense of nature as inherently unstable, a force lacking human rationality that can veer between eerie calmness and ferocious turbulence in an instant. ‘Earthy, potent’, ‘electric’, ‘nonchalant’ and ‘rustic’ are all instructions that appear in the score, and the piece provides a bracingly uningratiating statement quite different from Davies’s earlier ‘twisted funk’ style, as identified by Andrew Mellor in his booklet notes. ‘Earthy, potent’ could also serve to characterise the best piece on the album, Dune of Footprints (2017) for string orchestra. The organic feature depicted here is the ancient cave of Niaux in France in whose dark tunnels, Davies says, one walks on ‘ridged mounds of compressed sand and rock’. Her responding music works with a mix of solid yet shivering textures and slowly shifting densities that generate a remarkably vivid picture of the place, and of the effect it can have on those who explore it.

As a product of the machinery of nature working over millennia, Niaux is at the opposite extreme to New York’s World Trade Center, whose apocalyptic destruction on 9/11 was the subject of Davies’s opera Between Worlds, written with librettist Nick Drake in 2014. What Did We See? is an orchestral suite derived from the opera in 2018, and oddly proportioned in that the first movement lasts longer than its three successors put together. Though impressively crafted, and excellently played and recorded here, the dramatic music in this form acquires an almost oppressively epic quality that hardly seems to fit the source, though the short finale, called ‘Tree of Life’, sounds more like a lament and a memento mori, blessedly free of sentimentality and pathos.

For something entirely positive and heart-warming, the short piece Re-greening (2015), which Davies wrote for the NYO GB to play and sing without a conductor, is wonderfully deft and touching. With its richly proliferating lines and solemn pauses, it never falls back on old-style ‘dancing round the maypole’ clichés, for all its upbeat aura. Perhaps, it says, just perhaps, a truly green rebirth is still possible – environmental resurrection, not global extinction?