Shara Nova (b1974, known until 2016 under her married name of Worden) is a soprano and composer with her own group, My Brightest Diamond, equally at home in contemporary classical music and indie rock. Her collaborators include performance artist Laurie Anderson, The Decemberists, and The National. Nova has featured in these pages recording works by Muhly and Socolofsky (Bright Shiny Things, 1/23), as well as Sarah Kirkland Snider (Gramophone Contemporary Composer, 3/22), but this is her first full album as a composer. Her catalogue includes some 50 works, ranging from single songs to substantial, expressively experimental cycles and cantatas to instrumental and orchestral works, and an amusing ‘Baroque opera’, You Us We All (2015). Her understanding of the human voice and facility in writing for it are manifest throughout Titration (2022), a choral cycle written for The Crossing and Donald Nally, her second work for them following Carols after a Plague in 2021 (New Focus, 1/23). One can hear why they went back to Nova for a larger work. Titration demands attention, its 17 songs exploring themes of loss, grief, rage, even abuse, designed ‘as a therapeutic process in which one approaches trauma very slowly, “drop by drop”, so as to avoid unnecessary [emotional] distress’. Hence the title, from the chemical process designed to avoid explosions. There is – ironically – plenty of explosive music-making in The Crossing’s wonderful rendition, from the opening ‘Freeze State’, the furious ‘I’m so mad I could spit nails’ or ‘How do I keep feelin’ in this mean, mean world’ (the cycle’s emotional core), to the lovely song ‘Pulses’ and final laughter track. Titration draws one into its community of sound, where each sung word, hummed chord, frantic repeated note – in ‘Patterns of Protection’, dedicated to the slain in the Uvalde school massacre, sounding like automatic gunfire – hits its mark. A remarkable cycle, remarkably performed and splendidly recorded.