The City of Tomorrow are a pioneering wind quintet who like to explore ‘physical movement and spatial relationships’ (aspects not easily rendered on disc) and big issues such as climate change. Their first recording, ‘Nature’ (Ravello, 2015), explored the impact on the natural world of human action, and the centrepiece of this new programme, Hannah Lash’s Leander and Hero (2015), takes this one step further.

Lash reworks the old Greek myth, transforming the lovers into birds (represented by the piccolo – Hero – and E flat clarinet for Leander) and charting their courtship and nesting in nine, highly coloured descriptive (if often rather static) movements. Tragedy strikes with avian Leander’s loss in the second of two terrible storms, ‘the violent end of the world’, and Hero’s grief at finding his body. One curious instrumental effect recurs at several points, where one player creates a whistling sound by blowing across the mouth of a colleague’s instrument: something that will take more than the lifting of lockdown to normalise.

Donatoni’s Blow (1989) is the one non 21st-century work (though arguably the most modern-sounding), of which The City of Tomorrow gave the North American premiere as recently as 2010. It has since become an established repertoire piece, shown by their marvellously balanced and virtuoso account. I will not say ‘beautifully’ as this is a confrontational work, pivoting around Leander Star’s horn, ending on the most hostile gesture: a 13-second chord aimed at the audience. More impressive is Esa Pekka Salonen’s Memoria, a 2003 reworking of a piece from 20 years before, written to celebrate the 20th birthday of the groundbreaking Avanti! Ensemble. As the programme finale, it even functions as a memorial to Leander – and by inference the planet – and receives a wonderfully blended but in no way mournful interpretation that would grace any concert.