The pandemic has been hard on everyone, including musicians thwarted in pursuing their art. For singers in general and vocal ensembles in particular, it’s been an especially gruelling period, when lifting voices was considered risky business. So it’s a joy to hear the gleaming singers of Variant 6 sounding so fresh and motivated on their first full-length recording, ‘New Suns’, which was made both before the pandemic arrived and during a lull in the surge of – talk about irony – variants.

Let’s just say the music-making on this recording is infectious and leave it at that. Philadelphia-based Variant 6, who are devoted to expanding the repertoire for vocal ensemble, perform six recent works that are inspiring on many levels, from the marriage of meaningful texts and compelling music to the performances, which are astonishing in tonal focus, pinpoint intonation, subtlety of expression and sheer vocal virtuosity. It would be difficult to imagine the composers not pinching themselves to hear their creations given such radiant shaping.

Each of the works takes Variant 6 on a different musical journey. The three movements of Benjamin CS Boyle’s Supplice find the singers savouring ecstatic soundscapes set to poems by Paul Éluard, while Gabriel Jackson’s Zero Point Reflection transforms a poem by Doris Kareva into a cavalcade of colourful and audacious interactions for three women (Variant 6 sopranos Jessica Beebe and Rebecca Myers and mezzo-soprano Elisa Sutherland).

The writing in Bruno Bettinelli’s Madrigali a cinque voci miste is intricate and rich, and the sextet (which also includes tenors Steven Bradshaw and James Reese and bass-baritone Daniel Schwartz) grace the score with penetrating refinement. Jeremy Gill’s Six Pensées are vibrant settings of verses by Blaise Pascal, one a piquant condemnation of nefarious flies.

Jackson’s Spring is as fragrant in harmonic language as its subject, and Joanne Metcalf’s glistening The Sea’s Wash in the Hollow of the Heart, set to a poem by Denise Levertov, contains the line that gives the disc its title: ‘Let in new suns that beat and echo in the mind like sounds.’ As performed by Variant 6, those sounds are sumptuous.