Julia Wolfe’s music often draws on America’s chequered cultural and social history as subject matter for compositions which – in terms of sheer expressive impact, weight and punch – force us to rethink and reconsider the way in which the past is presented. Latterly, Wolfe’s focus has been on industrial America during the long 19th century, with works ranging from folk hero John Henry in Steel Hammer to the coal miners of north-eastern Pennsylvania in her powerful 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning Anthracite Fields.

In Fire in my Mouth, Wolfe’s gaze falls on the many young immigrant women who arrived on American shores from war-ravaged European countries around the turn of the 20th century in the hope of a new life, only to end up in circumstances that were hardly better than the ones they fled. Many female workers were shoved into the latter-day equivalent of factory sweatshops, enduring extremely long hours in appalling conditions. Apathy and negligence towards the struggle of these immigrant workers eventually led to a fire that swept through the Asch Building in New York on March 25, 1911, resulting in the deaths of 146 workers.

The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire forms the basis of this large-scale four-movement work for choir and orchestra. The opening movement, ‘Immigration’, starts positively enough. Excitement is conveyed through a swathe of sweeping orchestral gestures, tinged with wide-eyed wonder and a certain naivety as to what lies ahead in the chorus’s declamatory lines. The sense of anticipation is soon shattered in the second movement, ‘Factory’, where pounding strokes on percussion, scraping strings and bludgeoning stabs on winds and brass present us with a hellish vision of the factory floor. The workers’ voices rally against injustice in the third movement, ‘Protest’, but the horror of the second movement takes on a harrowing twist in the final section, ‘Fire’, where the factory women suffocate in the swooning heat and smoke of the fire. In a gesture resembling John Adams’s naming of the victims of the 9/11 attack in On the Transmigration of Souls, the workers who perished in the 1911 fire are recounted in the final section, punctuated by bell-like strikes in percussion, harp, piano and electric and bass guitars.

Hope, depression, anger and sorrow: Fire in my Mouth takes us through the various stages of grief but its main message – of fairness and equality to all humans, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or background – is one that remains worryingly relevant to our times, and one that is communicated with sobering urgency, energy and immediacy in Wolfe’s gripping work.