This compilation presents an attractive overview of the scope of Arthur Levering’s creative interests over the past decade and a half or so. Along with the triptych for chamber orchestra OceanRiverLake, after which it is titled, the album contains pieces for mixed trio, string quartet and solo piano. The Boston-based composer, who was born in 1953 in Baltimore, shows himself to be equally at home in all of these formats. An abundance of ideas expressed with economy characterises his music, as does Levering’s flair for formal invention and keen ear for colour and textural clarity – whether writing for a small orchestra or a solo keyboard.

OceanRiverLake is the collective title for three orchestral tone poems that were originally written independently: Il mare dentro (‘The Sea Within’), Flumen (‘River’) and Summer Morning by a Lake. Commissioned in 2008 by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and its founder Gil Rose, who perform all three pieces with exquisite detail and balance, Il mare dentro establishes a soundscape of floating harmonies and subtly shifting timbres intercut with rhythmic agitation.

Though, according to Levering’s commentary, ‘water gurgles, waves crash, sea gulls cry, and fog horns blare’, this piece and its companions are not so much programme music as contemporary reflections on some early modernist turning points that have become associated with water themes. Near Il mare dentro’s end, Levering quotes a passage from ‘Jeux de vagues’ in Debussy’s La mer, while Flumen – perhaps the most breathtaking of the triptych – more obliquely recalls the beginning of ‘The Housatonic at Stockbridge’, the final movement of Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England. Summer Morning by a Lake swerves dramatically in another direction, alluding both to Schoenberg’s ‘Klangfarbenmelodie’ in the third of his Five Pieces for Orchestra (borrowing the title Schoenberg added to please his publisher) and to the drowning scene in Berg’s Wozzeck.

Levering employs a delectable combination of piccolo, guitar (his own instrument) and celesta in the playful Giocattolo (‘Toy’) but also writes idiomatically for string quartet in Squeezebox, a set of miniatures that re-thread Celtic folk music into densely woven – and, in the third movement (‘The Ewe’s Reel’), surreal – textures.

Garland for Steven Stucky, the most recently composed work on the album (2020), is a homage to a dearly missed colleague in the form of 20 variations for solo piano. The theme comprises 48 notes that shape a ‘compound melody’ with vertiginous leaps of register. Donald Berman traces a compelling narrative across its transformations, underscoring Levering’s remarkable harmony of craft with imagination.