Matthew Kaner (b1986) studied music at King’s College London before moving on to postgraduate studies with Julian Anderson at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where he is now Professor of Composition. In her booklet note, Kate Romano, clarinettist and director of the Goldfield Ensemble, who perform the clarinet quintet At Night (2021), draws attention to Kaner’s upbringing in a family of artisans and craftsmen, and there is a tangible sense of the well-made in each of these carefully put-together works.

At Night is a diptych, its two movements titled, slightly disarmingly, ‘The Land of Nod’ and ‘Searching for the Dimmest Stars’ and inspired respectively by poems about night by RL Stevenson comfortably and comfortingly in the first movement, and cosmologist Rebecca Elson in the second, with its ethereal, spare textures shot through with faint gleams. The Piano Trio (2016-21) is more metaphorically earthbound, the first movement, ‘Glints in the Water’ (written first), spurred on by a few of Unsuk Chin’s piano studies. The central ‘Ripples’ is a beautiful meditation on the quiet movement of water on the surface of a pond. The final ‘Eroding Lines’ takes its cue from a fabric design of the composer’s mother and draws the threads of the Trio together very neatly.

Kaner’s sense of descriptive narrative is exemplified well by Mark Simpson’s delicate, swooping, wheeling and soaring rendition of ‘The Swift’ and ‘The Kestrel’, the two portraits of Flight Studies (2021). Indeed, the performances throughout, by a clutch of some of Britain’s finest chamber players, are extraordinarily good. The Goldfield Ensemble and the Baker-Lebhardt-Balzat trio are first-rate, and Baker and Lebhardt catch the patchwork tone pictures of the Highland Scenes (2016-19) with equal acuity. Guy Johnston relishes the textures of the Suite (2020), though I found its succession of mostly abbreviated, aphoristic pieces less compelling. Excellent sound, in a dryish acoustic.