Jake Runestad addresses two major issues in the choral works on this new album: post-traumatic stress disorder and the plight of our planet. Those are tall orders to portray in music, given the gravity of the subjects and the challenge of rising to the existential occasion. The American composer does so by treating each narrative with compassion, warmth and dramatic potency, their interplays of musical forces vividly conveying the intended messages.

Set to poetry by Brian Turner, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Dreams of the Fallen is an unsparing glimpse into the horrors and effects of battle. Runestad’s scoring for solo piano, chorus and orchestra provides a wealth of textures and atmospheres for the painful and sometimes hopeful images to achieve their expressive purpose. The piano is the chief conjuror of dreams both tender and angry (Jeffrey Biegel gives them striking immediacy), while the chorus and orchestra offer direct testimony through music of urgent and lyrical intensity.

The five movements of Runestad’s Earth Symphony, set to poetry by Todd Boss, comment on the arrival and collapse of humanity, degradation of the environment and the planet’s resilience. The lesson of Icarus’s foolhardy journey near the sun is underlined by the use of ancient musical sources. Dido’s Lament, from Purcell’s opera, receives a new mournful text (‘Sleep now, my children, now your days are done’). Runestad’s rich deployment of thematic motifs and choral-orchestral colours makes this despairing plea for ecological survival a forceful social statement.

True Concord Voices & Orchestra, an ensemble based in Tucson, Arizona, is led by founder Eric Holtan, who goes to the emotional heart of Runestad’s scores. The placement of the chorus, in Earth Symphony especially, is too distant to hear all of the words, but the significance of the sentiments to our time, and the future, comes through with bold and sensitive resolve.