The large-scale ensemble project In Search of Lost Beauty … (Starkland, 4/19) alerted many listeners to the intricately alluring sonic domain of Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, and this Ondine release focuses on her orchestral works of the last decade. Earliest here is Horizons (2013), whose inspiration in several contemporaneous films and novels is reflected in its disjunct contrast between musical types that evolve as though parallel layers of development towards an ending of acute pathos.

If the Chiaroscuro Trilogy (2017) is a less immersive experience, its probing the interplay of darkness and light, specifically the myriad gradations between them, proffers a distinctive take on the relationship between piano and strings. Hence the energising ascent of ‘Tunnel’ finds its expressive opposite with the steadily atrophying descent of ‘Meteors’; ‘Darkness of Light’ venturing ambivalently while inevitably towards an ending in which the process (to quote the composer) ‘from the dark of lightness to the darkness of light’ is subsumed into silence. A fine showing, too, from Gabrielius Alekna in what can seem a teasingly intangible piano part.

Of the most recent works, Millefleur (2018) draws on the botanical background in a series of French Baroque tapestries, its steadily accumulating incident provoking a central episode of ominous import that diffuses back into the earlier timbral miasma, before itself dissolving into silence. If such music can risk seeming overly impersonal, Saudade (2019) redresses the balance via the most diverse canvas Martinaitytė has used, the ‘longing’ of the Portuguese title reflected in its gradually accelerating velocity paralleled by calmly intensifying emotion.

The playing of the Lithuanian orchestras is at one with the composer’s idiom, Giedrė Šlekytė directing with the same perception she brought to music by Raminta Šerkšnytė (DG, 2/20). Finely recorded and annotated, this is an ideal way to explore Martinaitytė‘s singular musical vision.