This attractive, well-played album gathers together in one place five disparate works by Daniel Burwasser (b1960) previously issued separately in mixed-composer Navona issues. A graduate of Temple and Rutgers Universities, Burwasser studied with several distinguished teachers including Charles Wuorinen and David Del Tredici.

Burwasser’s music is straightforward in melodic and harmonic appeal, as can be heard in his brilliant orchestral toccata Catching Fireflies (1997). Resonant of Prokofiev, this virtuoso concert-opener (or encore) received a splendid performance by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra under Gerard Schwarz on Navona’s ‘Luminescence’ album in 2014. The brief wind quintet Whirlwind (2016) shows no falling-off of Burwasser’s powers of invention and entertainment in its three compact movements. The title is a misnomer, intended only to show his ‘interest in momentum and expressive concision’, wholly successfully. The tone poem A Well Traveled Road (1992), the earliest and largest work here (and the oldest recording), is curiously more elusive expressively for all the euphony of style. Not so the string-orchestral essay Flux, which so impressed Donald Rosenberg in this fine performance from Concordia under Marin Alsop.

I reviewed the recording of Puck’s Game (2019) on the Sirius Quartet’s ‘Playing on the Edge 2’ album, describing it as ‘the pick of the bunch … a vividly scored, rhythmic tour de force that catches the mercurial quality of the sprite from The Tempest to a tee’. I stand by that assessment and would suggest it as the pick here, too, though the sheer exuberance of Catching Fireflies is winning. The five works were recorded at five different locations – thousands of miles apart – by five different teams between 1995 and 2019; Melanie Montgomery’s mastering for this portrait album has smoothed out the sonic wrinkles very adeptly while retaining degrees of individuality (spaciousness for the orchestras, somewhat closer for the chamber ensembles) for each recording. A shame the album is a touch underfilled, but do give this a try.