Augusta Read Thomas’s association with Nimbus has been crucial to expanding her recorded profile, and this eighth release provides an instructive overview through works written these past five years. Practicable virtuosity is evident in Avian Capriccio, whose writing for brass quintet yields the lively interplay of ‘Hummingbirds’, regal detachment of ‘Swans’ and jazzy exchanges of ‘Canaries’. From here to Plea for Peace is to encounter understated eloquence in the melodic intensifying of its vocalise against plangent harmonies from the string quartet. Few non-specialist composers have written for carillon but Ripple Effects audibly makes the most of Rockefeller Chapel’s cascading panoply of bells and its starkly evocative resonance.

Timbral scintillation, long a facet of Thomas’s armoury, comes to the fore in The Auditions, a ballet in which the rhythmic vitality of its even-numbered movements is thrown into relief by the shimmering aura of the other four, as if placing human activity at an ethereal remove. The great Elliott Carter is referenced not merely in the title but also laconic wit and glinting dexterity of Two Thoughts About the Piano, with the heavenly flight of the moon goddess in Selene accorded more visceral presence in Cliff Colnot’s effective substitution of woodwind nonet for the string quartet. Setting one of EE Cummings’s most rapturous poems, Your Kiss draws a suitably fervent response from soprano and piano as it heads toward an ecstatic close.

As usual in this series, performances leave nothing to chance. Fortunate is the composer who has such committed exponents; but then, fortunate the artists who have music so idiomatically conceived and impressively realised. With consistently fine sound and detailed notes by Paul Pellay, this might just prove the release to win sceptics over to Augusta Read Thomas’s cause.