If Liza Lim isn’t on your musical radar, I suggest you remedy that. I can’t think of many other composers today who, on a grand scale, combine her mastery of colour and form with sensitive engagement to where we’re at ecologically. Following a monograph on her music by Tim Rutherford-Johnson (Wildbird Music: 2022), Lim returns on Kairos with Annunciation Triptych (2019 22), an orchestral cycle celebrating three female spiritual leaders: Sappho, Mary and Fatima (the latter the daughter of the prophet Muhammad). It focuses, Lim says, on how revelation and ritual connect different spiritual traditions. Alongside this, it explores the natural environment and the classical orchestral tradition.

In Sappho/Bioluminescence, Lim analogises the radiant power of Sappho’s poetry with the way in which some creatures (fireflies, deep-sea fish) create light in their body. About a third of the way through – following an opening riot of sound featuring overplucked harp, microtonal winds, and strings cascading like a shoal of fish – the titular announcement arrives in a striking spectralist chord built on burnished brass tones. The brass’s major triads set a foundation over which percussive patterns scatter to and fro. There is a Messiaenesque languorous eroticism to this music, apt for Sappho’s love poetry, and the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln’s performance is superbly controlled, lush but sharply defined.

The second work, Mary/Transcendence after Trauma, opens with a lyrical minor-key string texture. We are in the Virgin Mary’s place as, terrified, she receives the angel Gabriel, signalled by bass drum strikes against silence, setting off piano string harmonics. A piano solo suggests Mary’s delirium at this terrifying visitation. A while later, the strings play what sounds like a quotation of the opening of the Lohengrin Prelude, signalling the 19th-century conversation Lim’s triptych strikes up. The closing work, Fatimah/Jubilation of Flowers, opens with an elegiac trombone solo playing a motif based on ascending and descending perfect fourths. After a couple of minutes, the soprano Emily Hindrichs enters, singing expressively the regal trombone motif with lyrics from poetry by Etel Adnan. Are these three works symphonic poems of sorts? Decide for yourself.