Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (b1973), a Lithuanian composer living in New York, has been building a considerable reputation for herself in recent years, and this recording shows exactly why. Her biography tells of a series of composers with whom she took masterclasses after her initial studies in Lithuania, including Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey and José Evangelista. Apart from the precision of her ear, I do not hear much in common with Ferneyhough, but there are qualities in her writing that seem to me to connect to aspects of Harvey and Evangelista, not least the interest in the sheer expressiveness of a single note or chord, though often stretched out over a long timespan, so that one has the sense of an atmosphere building and disintegrating very slowly.

This is certainly true of the first work here, Nunc fluens, nunc stans, composed during the first months of the pandemic in 2020. The piece is both static and in constant movement at the same time, expressing the composer’s idea that ‘we had only a Now, which seemingly lost its flow and stood still for a while’. Was standing still ever this gripping, I wonder? Ex tenebris lux is from 2021 and is also a very gradual journey made in response to the pandemic, from dark textures towards an increasingly fragmented kind of writing, in which different kinds of articulation are exploited and there is a sense of working towards a melody that never quite arrives, being derailed by a series of dramatic plunges into the depths. It ends on a note of seeming acceptance.

Sielunmaisema (2019), for solo cello and string orchestra, is a journey through the seasons, although, as Frank J Oteri points out in his notes, this is far from a Vivaldian romp. There is consciousness of the climate crisis and, in the way in which the movements run into each other, somehow an acknowledgement that clear-cut breaks between seasons are not what they once were. In fact, if one wanted a Vivaldian title for the work, it would surely be ‘Il mondo al rovescio’ – the world upside down. This is dark, powerful music in which there is a hidden core of light. All of this is wonderfully transmitted by the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra in Ondine’s crystal-clear but never too-resonant recording.