This album featuring Roxanna Panufnik’s chamber works will come as a surprise to listeners more familiar with the theme of hope and reconciliation that is often a feature of her choral music. We are introduced instead to the voices of the fallen and the forgotten – victims of circumstance, time and place. The language of Panufnik’s chamber music is far more intense and introspective, displaying darker colours and frayed edges.

Set in the First World War, Private Joe for baritone and string quartet draws on soldiers’ eyewitness accounts. The short song-cycle maps a musical journey that begins with cautious optimism before turning to hopelessness and despair, and ending (as is so often the case) with death. Bookended by two letters sent home from the trenches by Private Joe Wood written within the space of a few weeks, a rowdy, bacchanalian rendition of the traditional song ‘When I die’ leads to Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Letter’, which graphically evokes the duality between boredom and terror that shellshocked soldiers endured on a daily basis. Icy harmonies depict a barren no man’s land in ‘From Albert to Bapaume’. The agitated, nervous expression found in Joe Wood’s second letter – brilliantly characterised by baritone Roderick Williams – bears all the hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder avant la lettre.

In Panufnik’s music, words seem to provide her with the means to get to the heart of the matter. This is quite literally the case of Heartfelt for string quartet, where a reconstruction of a recording of a bear’s heartbeat is used in the ‘Lament for a Bulgarian Dancing Bear’ to draw attention to the way in which these animals were regularly maltreated until relatively recently.

Originally composed in 2004, Letters from Burma for oboe and string quartet has acquired a deeper resonance given recent events in Myanmar. The second movement in particular depicts children trying to touch their parents, who remain locked behind bars like caged birds due to their political convictions. A doomed medieval love story forms the basis for Cantator and Amanda for bassoon and string quartet. False relations and bittersweet harmonies are made to ring painfully true given the predicament of the two lovers (Cantator was a monk who, it is said, was bricked up alive for his sins).

Alongside Panufnik’s piano piece Second Home in an arrangement for piano, voice and string quartet, sung with haunting beauty by soprano Mary Bevan, the disc also features two excellent solo string compositions that started life as test pieces for string competitions: Canto for viola and Hora Bessarabia for violin (the latter presented here in a reworked duet version for violin and double bass).

Despite the serious nature of the subject matter, one senses that the Sacconi Quartet had a ball in the recording studio. In addition to the usual repertoire of string techniques, they are called on at various times to sing, sigh, cry, stamp their feet and imitate all kinds of other instruments – all part of the rich tapestry of a string player’s life, one suspects.