Each of the works on this recording of music by David Biedenbender seizes the ear through a blend of expressive beauty and formal prowess. In two song-cycles and two instrumental pieces written within the past decade, the American composer explores a range of feelings about love, family and nature. The narratives are at turns rapturous and intimate, menacing and exuberant. Biedenbender isn’t afraid to wear heart on sleeve as he applies telling nuances to concise, exquisitely shaped sonic tales.

The song-cycles are set to poetry by Robert Fanning, who shares the composer’s parental concerns in Shell and Wing and the disc’s titular all we are given we cannot hold. Sustained vocal lines and glistening instrumental sonorities fill the urgent spaces in the two movements of Shell and Wing, which pays subtle tribute to Schumann’s Kinderszenen even as Biedenbender’s lyrical writing gives distinctive modern urgency to musings on parents and children.

In all we are given we cannot hold, the themes of holding on and letting go receive nostalgic and wrenching treatment. The seven songs reveal the mutability of Biedenbender’s art, which responds to Fanning’s verses with comforting and playful enchantment or turns ominous as a family is about to be wiped out in a car crash. The soprano in both cycles is Lindsay Kesselman, whose shimmering timbre, emotional acuity and ability to render words clear in every register can only be termed mesmerising. Her collaborators – the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble in Shell and Wing and the Haven Trio, of which Kesselman is a member, in all we are given we cannot hold – play on equally alluring levels.

The two instrumental works confirm that Biedenbender doesn’t need words to achieve compelling musical results. Red Vesper, scored for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, is alternately spare and spacious in its tribute to National Parks. The open harmonies, string harmonics and fervent overlapping of lines go beyond mere description to suggest cosmic connections with the environment and beyond.

Solstice, Biedenbender’s depiction of the four seasons as experienced from the Garth Newel Music Center in Warm Springs, Virginia, revels in the sounds of nature, including crickets in the opening movement, ‘Summer’. But the emphasis is more on atmospheric gestures than on Vivaldi-like evocations of outdoor activities, though Biedenbender does kick up heels in the rambunctious country dancing that catapults ‘Spring’. The Garth Newel Piano Quartet bring these beguiling tone poems to vivid life.