Seth Parker Woods puts his stylistic range and extraordinary musicianship on display in this intensely personal programme. In Fredrick Gifford’s Difficult Grace (2019), for example, Woods reads a reconfigured text of Dudley Randall’s poem ‘Primitives’ while he plays – and more than that, he employs a variety of spoken accents, proving himself to be an effective actor as well as a virtuoso cellist. Nathalie Joachim also requires he speak and play simultaneously in The Race: 1915 (2019), a powerful piece inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s series of 60 paintings about the Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North. Woods’s playing suffers not at all from the multifarious demands put on him; listen to his gloriously warm tone starting at 2'45", where Joachim quotes Tom Lemonier’s tune ‘Praise God we are not weary’.

In Joachim’s other work, Dam Mwen Yo (2017), Woods plays over and around a pre-recorded tapestry of women singing (the voices representing the strong women in the composer’s Haitian family), with the cello, perhaps, the internal musings of one who’s listening in. I’m not as taken with Ted Hearne’s Freefucked (2022), a suite of songs set to poems by Kemi Alabi, although here Woods sings as well as speaks, and does an impressive job of it. The poems are edgy and lusciously erotic but Hearne’s glitchy music is more a distraction than an enhancement. Monty Adkins’s Winter Tendrils (2014/20) for cello and an atmospheric pre-recorded soundtrack does the neat trick of sounding lush and spare all at once, and provides another example of Woods’s ability to project ecstatic lyricism.

‘Calvary Ostinato’ from Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Lamentations: Black/Folk Song Suite (1980) and Alvin Singleton’s Argoru II (1970) are the only works not expressly written for Woods, as well as the only works for cello without electronics. The former is a bluesy study in pizzicato while the latter is a modernist tour de force that Woods plays with enraptured ferocity. Taken as a whole, this programme is dazzlingly inventive and reveals Woods to be a musician of uncommon communicative power.