Composers draw inspiration from myriad sources in their efforts to create distinctive narratives. The eclectic works on this album of music by Linda Dusman have titles that hint at origins while exploring novel means of expression and divergent styles. As stated in the booklet notes, Dusman ‘composes in the sonic terrain between concert music and sound art, often engaging with the natural world and current politics’.

The terrains represented here – and portrayed in vibrant performances – comprise short pieces of varied instrumentation and programmatic suggestion. It isn’t necessary to pinpoint thematic specifics in Dusman’s scores to be drawn into their compelling interplay of techniques and utterance. Flashpoint, the disc’s title-work, finds a bass flute emitting whooshes, violent attacks, busy keystrokes and high harmonics that allude to the motion of flames.

Tender melodies rub shoulders with passages from Paganini’s Sixth Caprice in Dream Prayer Lullaby, in which a solo violin travels the extremes of possibility, from long tones and pizzicato details to tapping effects and yearning phrases. The unusual combination of clarinet and trombone is used to vivid effect in Lake, Thunder, a multihued conversation built of intertwining motifs and code-like sharing of material.

The atmosphere in Dancing Universe, for piano trio, blends lilting lyricism with caustic commentary, intimating that this universe is a realm of conflicted perceptions. Dusman’s response to the coronavirus pandemic is distilled in Corona Bagatelles, five movements for cello and piano that probe alienation, anger and hope.

Only one instrument is highlighted in and numberless quotidian happenings, but the bass drum is employed to inventive and subtle ends, especially as played with articulate clarity by Tom Goldstein, who also speaks verses from Serena Hilsinger’s poem ‘Salvage’.

Dusman’s dexterity with a chamber ensemble is on display in Mother of Exiles, a tone poem whose rhapsodic, gossamer and suspenseful sonorities are said to suggest ‘what the Statue of Liberty must be thinking in our current political climate’, as the booklet notes state. Whatever it means, the piece embraces bits of Sheherazade, Stravinskian rhythmic activity and ensemble humming in an alluring tale that shows a composer in full command of her individual art.