Any artistic endeavour related to the Holocaust is held to a different standard: the gulf between the artist’s intentions and the audience reception can be unusually wide and full of complications. Putting listeners through such wrenching subject matter has to have a thoughtful pay-off while performers have a particular responsibility to make the clearest possible case for the work at hand. And in this recording of the Jake Heggie/Gene Scheer triptych Out of Darkness, only one out of three sections comes through on both fronts.

Out of Darkness is an assemblage of song cycles of sorts, starting with the monodrama Another Sunrise, depicting an Auschwitz survivor struggling to tape-record her experiences amid massive survivor’s guilt. Though Heggie’s music is completely available to the shifting moods of Scheer’s text, most of it is written in the same vocal register – one reason why the promising, lustrous soprano Caitlin Lynch delivers an undifferentiated, full-voiced tone that leaves the ear weary. Semi-comprehensible diction further limits the performance’s expressive range.

In the second part, Farewell, Auschwitz, Scheer adapts Polish lyrics written by the real-life version of the Another Sunrise camp survivor, often steeped in irony, particularly in the keenly observed portrait of the camp’s order-obsessed typist. This is the most successful of the three parts. All three vocalists are used in various configurations, sometimes in a 1940s version of European scat singing. The even balance of wind and strings in the small Music of Remembrance ensemble suggests Kurt Weill’s German cabaret mode – particularly apt in the ‘Farewell, Auschwitz’ song with trudging rhythms suggesting that survival comes with the challenge of living out one’s life having seen too much.

For a Look or a Touch, the third part, is a revised version of Heggie’s 2007 work of the same name about the plight of gay people in concentration camps. The spoken oral history between songs is cut, as are several songs, though this version retains the stomach-turning portrait of a man stripped of his clothing and ripped to pieces by dogs. Baritone Morgan Smith is vocally polished, though the addition of his own emotionalism (and vibrato) doesn’t always allow the music and text of these highly charged scenes to speak for themselves.