Canadian cellist Arlen Hlusko commissioned Nineteen Movements for Unaccompanied Cello from American composer Scott Ordway in 2017 and the two worked together on the 50-minute score for more than a year while both were affiliated with the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Ordway meant each movement to reflect themes of ‘solitude and wilderness: walking, singing, wind, and waves’, and Hlusko, along with Ordway a newly appointed member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, responded with a co-creator’s insight, respect for silence and sweep of focus.

Most of the movements are related to a twin and the resulting symmetry, which is felt as much as it is heard, provides a continuum for musical ideas and experiments that have an absorbing originality of their own; the occasional thoughts of Bach, Britten and Kodály seem built into the heritage of the cello itself as an instrument. Ordway likes to write quick music in slow tempos, and although some movements are not technically difficult, requiring merely an infinite variety of nuance, others such as No 7 show what can be accomplished by a virtuoso cellist circa 2018.

The world premiere was held in the ‘pristine acoustic conditions’ of James Turrell’s stunning Chestnut Hill Skyspace, housed in a Quaker meeting house in Philadelphia, and a similar purity of sound has been captured on the recording, made at Rutgers University’s Nicholas Music Center, in which the sound of Hlusko’s cello, an unlabelled instrument of uncertain provenance, perhaps made in the mid-1800s, speaks directly in a meditative flow.