David Owen Carpenter (b1972) was born in Poughkeepsie, NY, though is now resident in Philadelphia, and is an alumnus of Bates College, Lewiston, ME, Peabody Conservatory and Temple University, Philadelphia, among other locations. He composes in a millennial free-tonal idiom, looking to the future but unafraid to reference the past, as shown by the earliest work here, the String Trio (2014). It is cast in three compact movements, fast slow-fast, with more complex internal structures than that suggests. The model, as he concedes in the booklet note, was Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, mainly for its range of moods and harmonic language. There are no intended thematic quotes but – unconsciously – one of the main motifs truncates the Russian’s motto to E flat-C-B (ie Es-C-H in German notation).

The Piano Sonata (2015) is also in three movements, though it started life as a six-minute Rhapsody to be a recital companion piece for Chopin’s Third Piano Sonata. After Katelyn Bouska had premiered it, she requested Carpenter add two further movements to form a sonata. Its neo-romantic manner can be heard as a commentary on 19th-century music and is not intended as a pastiche.

The song-cycle From the Valley of Baca (2016) contains nine settings, five of poems by Emma Lazarus, separated by four excerpts from the 84th Psalm in Hebrew (a concept suggested by Lazarus’s eponymous poem, which is prefaced by a section of the psalm). Together they form a metaphor of a dispossessed people, whether Lazarus’s Jewish contemporaries persecuted in 19th-century Europe or Syrian refugees in 2015. It is a subtle cycle, nicely sung by its dedicatee, Lawrence Indik, lacking only a big standout number or memorable tune. Fine, sensitive performances all round, caught in rather airless recordings made on four separate occasions in late 2017. Definitely worth investigating.