Morton Feldman’s 1982 Three Voices for female voice accompanied by two pre-recorded tracks relayed through a pair of giant loudspeakers – which symbolise the tombstones of the poet Frank O’Hara and the painter Philip Guston, to whom the work is dedicated – has had a chequered history on disc. Joan La Barbara’s problematic premiere recording, on the defunct New Albion label (12/90), is an expensive buy on second-hand Amazon, while Marianne Schuppe’s version for Col Legno is compromised by its pinched, dry recorded sound. A performance by three ‘live’ sopranos (Françoise Kubler, Marie Madeleine Koebelé, Laura Zimmermann) on the Canadian label L’Empreinte Digitale is elegantly executed but, I’d argue, robs the music of its subliminal tension between live performer and dead technology.

The British soprano Juliet Fraser, best known for her work with the vocal ensemble Exaudi, has clearly intuited the lessons of these earlier readings. She moves at a slower pace through Feldman’s score – 53 minutes against La Barbara and Schuppe’s 49 – a decision, she says, that grounds her performance ‘in a workable mean pulse from which I then invited certain passages to deviate gently’. Feldman designed the piece around La Barbara, and her vocal athletics are flawless and impressive, but the brighter tempo and intimate recording generates psychoacoustic ‘wobbles’ between partials – an alluring but ultimately overwhelming sound.

In Fraser’s performance, though, space opens up between your ears and the recorded environment, terrain into which the music unfolds. Feldman’s fancy that the pre-recorded material symbolises past lives into which the live performer breathes life is woven into La Barbara’s version as the nasal, filtered quality of the tape gets warmed in the moment. Fraser pushes this concept further. Falling parallel chromatic chord sequences put you in mind of close-miked, close-harmony singing (spiced with exquisite nudges against equal temperament) which contrast with a more natural vocal tone elsewhere. As the piece progresses, Feldman begins to feed a Frank O’Hara poem – ‘Who’d have thought that snow falls’ – inside melodic patterns that are already spiralling downwards and melting away. A snowblinding mesh of strong beats crossing weaker downbeats keeps the music static yet oddly busy – the delicate tread of Fraser’s rhythmic footfall leading you further into the blizzard.