This is the second album Navona has devoted entirely to the music of Rain Worthington (b1949), though her works – including some featured here – appear on a dozen more. Her music is tricky to pin down stylistically, a consequence of her innately intuitive approach to composition and to her being self-taught. (Contrary to Navona’s publicity, being an autodidact as a composer is not at all unique: Havergal Brian, Schoenberg, Steve Elcock, Sorabji and Takemitsu, to pluck a few names at random, were all, in varying degrees, self-taught.) In broad terms, her music is tonally based, sometimes a touch freely so, strong on atmosphere and sonorities, well laid out for the instruments. Her style is not especially personal, with resonances (quite accidental, I suspect) of other composers, whether early Aulis Sallinen in the edgier sections of Full Circle (2018) or even Vaughan Williams in Shadows of the Wind (2019) and the string-orchestral Within Deep Currents (2020).

The programme is nicely balanced between orchestral and chamber works, all composed during the past 11 years. The most immediately impressive of the smaller-scale pieces are two of the earliest, the violin duo Night Stream (2011) – cleanly played by Antonín Hradil and Jakab Látal – and Resolves for solo cello (2016), performed here in a private studio recording by the wonderfully named Carmine Miranda. Balancing on the Edge of Shadows (2020) was commissioned by violinist Audrey Wright for her to play with her accompanist, Yundu Wang, who premiered it on Navona’s ‘Things in Pairs’ album, repeated here with rather clattery piano tone.

It will be noted that Worthington’s titles are all descriptive, as the works are variants of tone poems and fantasias. The only generic musical title – rhapsody – occurs as the subtitle of In Passages, a fine mini-violin concerto nicely given by Mojca Ramušćak with the Croatian Chamber Orchestra. The Janáček and Moravian Philharmonic orchestras perform the remaining orchestral works very convincingly. Good sound.