Currently nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize (previous winners include Hans Abrahamsen’s let me tell you and Per Nørgård’s Gilgamesh), Tyler Futrell’s 2021 Stabat mater has already made its mark, even before the release of this premiere recording by Lars-Erik ter Jung and his Terjungensemble.

Scoring for soprano and mezzo soloists, strings and harpsichord puts the 30-minute work in direct dialogue with Pergolesi’s setting of the same words. It would certainly make an intriguing diptych in performance: musical text and commentary, history and homage, two meditations poised between anguish and sensuality. Adding to the sonic palimpsest Futrell consciously constructs – ‘a meta-work, a Stabat mater about the Stabat mater’ – are explicit nods to Górecki and Brahms, with softer echoes of Pärt and Abrahamsen in the background.

But despite the piece’s rich and acknowledged lineage, there’s an even stronger sense of Futrell’s own identity, his confidence in using his material to create something new. And with the work’s premiere delayed by covid, eventually given shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there’s plenty new to say about mothers and their lost sons, violence, loss and faith.

The music’s beauty is arresting, all the more so for the scuttling, juddering, convulsive sonic violence from which it often emerges: a radiant Raphael Madonna who has strayed into an El Greco Crucifixion. We open and close in a place beyond pitch. Wooden tremors pass through the ensemble (an anticipation of the earthquake to come?), bow-backs bounce on strings, surfaces are struck and heavy pizzicatos ricochet; later, pitches bend and buckle.

On to this fractured surface spills the balm of the two solo voices. The high-lying soprano’s keening purity constantly threatens to tip into a scream, and as we move through the text from an arm’s-length vision to a shared suffering, vocal tone clouds and notes falter into croaks. Eirin Rognerud and Astrid Nordstad bring all the gestural drama of live performance (where directions instruct them to move around the space or, in one instance, cover their singing mouth) to a recording where we also benefit from greater clarity of detail from ter Jung’s instruments. This already feels like a modern classic.

Two shorter works, Vuggesang and Brittle Fluid, both newly arranged for this recording, complete the recital. Each an exercise in textural extrapolation – the first densely layered and the second a mesmerisingly restricted minimalism – they help flesh out the picture of a composer with a singular and appealing voice.