Meredith Monk’s Memory Game (2016-17) can be viewed as one single composition (not unlike a 1980s concept album), a pair of suites or even as nine separate pieces that nonetheless interconnect. The first five tracks – ‘Spaceship’, ‘Gamemaster’s Song’, ‘Migration’, ‘Memory Song’ and ‘Downfall’ – form, in the composer’s own description, a suite from her science-fiction opera The Games (1983-84), which with ‘Tokyo Cha Cha’ (from Turtle Dreams Cabaret, 1983) and ‘Double Fiesta’ (1986, from Acts from Under and Above) have been reimagined here in arrangements by Bang on a Can All-Stars’ David Lang, Michael Gordon, Ken Thomson and Julia Wolfe, as well as Monk’s vocal ensemble colleague Allison Sniffin.

The suite from The Games sets the tone for the album: the musical style may be to mainstream opera what the graphic novel is to King Lear but it has a catchy cinematic immediacy. The opera’s dystopian vision of ritualistic games enacted by humanity on a new home planet is like a cross between The Hunger Games and Serenity while the baleful figure of the Gamemaster – a combination of the MC from Cabaret and Killian from The Running Man, brilliantly declaimed in a virtuoso, theatrical rendition by Theo Blackmann – leads the new Mankind into Downfall. As a move on from that denouement, Monk has collated four pieces from other theatre pieces of hers to take the concept in a different direction. The arrangements of the latter quartet make them fit sonically with The Games suite here, but at some cost: the two-piano original of Totentanz (2006; available on YouTube) has a much greater, Stravinskian bite than in David Lang’s reworking. I am not a fan of some of the, let’s call it naive, vocalisation style but this is, on the whole, an intriguing release, a touch fiercely recorded. Devotees of Monk need not hesitate.