The two affecting works on The Crossing’s new album find the composers making observations from different perspectives. Self-Portraits 1964, Unfinished provides glimpses into Martin Bresnick’s thoughts as a teenager ruminating on life. Mason Bates’s Mass Transmission evokes long-distance communications between a Dutch mother and her daughter, who is working in the East Indies in the 1920s.

As stylistically varied as the pieces may be, they share expressive terrain of immediate allure. Bresnick teams a chamber choir with a saxophone quartet, which contributes subtle and haunting atmospheric details to six highly personal narratives. The saxophones set scenes with lonely chords, soar as birds and add yearning to verses by Herman Melville, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy and James Joyce.

Among the sentiments in Hopkins’s ‘I Wake’ is the disc’s title, ‘Ways You Went’, a fervent depiction of dreams and nightmares. The choral lines throughout the cycle overlap and echo, sometimes through the supple intermingling of solo voices with instruments. It is a compelling and touching journey the penetrating choristers of The Crossing and lustrous saxophonists of the PRISM Quartet perform with meticulous polish and urgency.

Bates weaves poignant tales in Mass Transmission, whose three movements combine choral utterances with electronic sounds (radio, gramophone, gamelan sonorities) and organ lines. The outer movements are set to texts from official government documents that include mother-daughter conversations; the second movement, describing the beauty of Java, is an excerpt from a diary written by a Dutch woman.

The contrasts between tender and mechanical auras are striking as cast by Bates in a spectrum of colours, ranging from hushed vocal statements to declamatory, non-vocal gestures. The composer applies his characteristic use of electronics to refined effect, always guided by dramatic context.

Organist Scott Dettra anchors Bates’s textures as The Crossing’s singers shape phrases with their extraordinary amalgam of focus and eloquence. As led by Donald Nally, the ensemble is virtually unrivalled in adding new works to the choral repertoire and performing them to the artistic hilt.