For his solo debut album, the Jamaican-American viola player Jordan Bak has put together a recital of daringly introspective music played with haunting lyrical grace, five works for solo viola bookended by two with pianist Ji Yung Lee.

After Rebecca Clarke’s seductive Untitled, with its swept scales and kittenish curls, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti’s Kòu Inoa creates a meditative haze of bariolage bowing between open and stopped strings, before the premiere recording of Tyson Gholston Davis’s alternately frantic and sombre Tableau XII sets the stage for Joan Tower’s Wild Purple, a spectacular tour de force, a super-étude. ‘I never thought of the viola as being particularly wild’, Tower wrote, ‘so I decided to try and see if I could create a piece that had wild energy in it.’ She succeeded beyond all measure and Bak responds with a performance that rises splendidly to the gorgeous lyrical centre before descending into realms of impossible virtuosity.

Quinn Mason’s moving soliloquy In Memory introduces the two last and longest works in the set, both of which operate at deeply reflective levels. Jeffrey Mumford’s Wending was dedicated to viola player Wendy Richman, a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble. Tōru Takemitsu’s viola concerto A String Around Autumn features beautiful playing by Lee and provides Bak with intimate internal dialogues that enable him to explore the sounds the viola can make when it is played compassionately and with that range of sotto voce tone so well suited to his instrument, and including a series of passionate double-stops.