Having first made quite an impression back in 2013 with the strikingly original Partita for 8 Voices, followed last year by Orange – an hours’ worth of music for the Attacca Quartet (a Nonesuch and New Amsterdam records co-release, 8/19) – this new disc sees the American composer draw on both voices and strings in two new works, recorded live with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale.

The song-cycle Is a Rose features Shaw’s by now trademark technique of placing familiar musical objects in unfamiliar contexts. Setting words by Robert Burns, the contemporary poet Jacob Polley and Shaw herself, pop-song-like inflections and melodic shapes are melded with PBO’s period-instrument, rosin-tanned timbres and brittle harpsichord to create a subtly arresting musical alchemy. This reflective backdrop provides Anne Sofie von Otter’s resonant mezzo voice with enough time and space to weigh up each word and line with delicate nuance – from the folklike innocence of Burns’s ‘Red, red rose’ to the Broadway lilt of ‘And so’.

An altogether more dramatic and dynamic approach is taken in the other work on this recording, The Listeners. Described by Shaw as a latter-day oratorio, this 35-minute work for two soloists, chorus and orchestra takes as its starting point the Golden Records – the two gold-plated phonograph records that were launched into deep space by Voyager spacecrafts in 1977, containing music and messages that might one day be intercepted by extraterrestrial life forms. Tapestry-like in design (excerpts from the recordings themselves are heard in ‘Greeting’, in addition to the voice of Carl Sagan – the scientist who spearheaded the Golden Records project – in ‘That’s us’), The Listeners makes particularly effective use of the low-lying ranges of contralto Avery Amereau and bass-baritone Dashon Burton. Amereau adds vivid operatic splashes of colour to ‘In world’s vast frame’, while gravitas and solemnity imbue Burton’s enunciation of Whitman’s ‘Let your soul stand cool’. Shaw draws on PBO’s more expanded forces of voices, winds, brass and percussion to create a vivid space-inspired soundscape that’s replete with pulsing patterns, propulsive pitch-cycles and harmonies that zoom – Doppler-like – into focus, before receding rapidly again into the distance.