Torus (2016), sphere (2017) and Antisphere (2019) are three examples of what Emily Howard calls ‘orchestral geometries’, titles that embody her concern with shapes and spaces suggesting musical structures and compositional processes. So far, so abstract: an attitude to art distancing itself from psychology and poetics. Nevertheless, feelings cannot be completely suppressed. The players are invited to respond to textures the composer describes as ‘visceral’ or ‘skeletal’, as well as to play the music ‘lucidly’. There is nothing pallidly recondite here. The music deals with processes that countless other composers have explored, including the possibility of moving between scientific materialism and more mysterious states of mind. It’s a world that might lead you to expect affinities with Varèse, Xenakis, Scelsi – even the Russian maverick Galina Ustvolskaya.

The culminating panel of the triptych, Antisphere, was premiered by Simon Rattle and the LSO; this performance is viewable on the internet and provides an ideal introduction to the imaginative interplay between metal percussion and other orchestral groups that Howard deploys to suggest sonic analogies to the character of objects in space – frozen in sustained stability at one extreme, fracturing into brightly coloured shards at the other. Yet, despite Torus’s subtitle of ‘Concerto for Orchestra’, there is no indulgence in mere display. Intensity is preferred to elaboration, but listeners are given the space to recognise the similarities of mood and material encountered during the course of each work, as well as the differences. On this album, all three orchestras, all three conductors and all three recordings fit well with the overriding need for lucidity as well as resolution – there’s a sense of confidence that the means are always precisely suited to the expressive ends.

Compass (2022), the fourth piece on the disc, is the most recent. Its scoring for a solo percussionist and string septet brings it closer to chamber music, so it is perhaps appropriate that a spirit of subjective unease comes across from time to time, countering the range of more decisive expressive states that predominate. There is an almost raw quality to both the string sound and the reverberating clangour of percussion in this premiere performance by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, making it clear that however grandly cosmic the thinking from which these compositions start out, the end results are intensely human as well as deeply satisfying.