The String Orchestra of Brooklyn’s new album features first recordings of works that transform notions of what 22 strings and half a dozen percussionists can do.

The Kanaka Maoli composer Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti’s with eyes the color of time, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Music, has a devotional style that at times suggests earlier models. Her six pictures at an exhibition refer to works of art featured at the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu in the late 1980s by George Rickey, Deborah Butterfield, James Seawright, Toshiko Takaezu and David Hockney – the latter’s set for L’enfant et les sortilèges. Lanzilotti’s music is Impressionistic, with a muted palette and an underlying sense of pace alongside its apparent randomness. The opening ‘the bronze doors’ seems smudged in fog, the cellos and basses in ‘les sortilèges’ are painfully eloquent, there is ecstasy in the raspings of ‘silhouette’ and ‘mahina’ is the most intense movement, before the final ‘enfolding’ recalls the beginning.

Scott Wollschleger’s Outside Only Sound, recorded live, was rehearsed, as the commission required, for only ‘a few minutes prior to the performance’, and as the sounds of the Brooklyn park scrape themselves together into bits of pitch and texture a luminescent glow begins to emanate; eventually its electric urban energy consummates in the tinkling of tinyxbells. In order for the work to fulfil the other requirement, that it ‘make sense in an outdoor environment’, the players use stopwatches in order, the composer says, to ‘function as one of a group of insects in a field, or like a gaseous cloud of sound’.