Conspirare’s new recording featuring the Austin-based choral group and three guitar quartets bookends impressive large-scale works by Nico Muhly and Kile Smith with small jewels by Reena Esmail and founding conductor Craig Hella Johnson.

Smith’s The Dawn’s Early Light features only one guitar quartet but the most beautiful texts, from Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s 1883 autobiography, one of the earliest books by a Native American woman. Smith movingly finds the heart in moments such as ‘With the help of Him who notes the sparrow’s fall, I mean to fight for my race while life lasts’, while his optimistic, improvisatorial reimagining of what the Star-Spangled Banner could be, ‘untethered to memory, feeling its way through pride, atrocity and respect for an ideal’, might in a parallel universe be adopted as a new national anthem.

The participation of three guitar quartets from LA and Texas adds texture and warmth to Muhly’s How Little You Are, a thoughtful 40-minute meditation on the words of American pioneer women in the 19th century, its lovely solos sung by Estelí Gomez. Esmail’s When the Guitar – inspired by a 14th-century Persian lyric, ‘When the guitar can forgive the past, it starts singing’ – uses the intriguing sounds of the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet as one of the layers of a fabulous wrap for the chorus. Johnson’s serene The Song That I Came to Sing, which sets a Rabindranath Tagore poem for cello and treble voices, was composed as a framing piece for the programme ‘which would reflect aspects of unfulfilled purpose and a longing for intimacy with the Divine’.