Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony heroically meet the challenges of two large orchestral works by Aaron Jay Kernis that speak in blocks of sound and episodes, and create narratives from shafts and vectors of movement and light. The brilliantly recorded results show how the composer’s language has saddened and deepened in response to the changing times.

Kernis composed Color Wheel for the gala opening of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Kimmel Center in 2001 and to celebrate the orchestra’s centennial. An awesome timpani roll, enough itself to sell a pair of loudspeakers, introduces passages of frozen time like Nevsky’s ice lake leading to Oz-like poppy-field fantasies, delirious woodwinds and brass attitudes, and suddenly you realise you’re in the middle of what the composer calls a ‘miniature’ concerto for orchestra, just the kind of exhilarating showpiece that had been ordered.

Kernis’s Fourth Symphony, Chromelodeon (which he defines as ‘chromatic, colourful, melodic music performed by an orchestra’), was written 17 years later and you can feel the times in the music by the influences (Nhat Hanh, John Cage and Handel) and the themes. The first movement begins with instruments that glow in the dark, the winds making like an organ, a sinuous cello assaulted by shrieks. The second movement reflects on the words of ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ in Rinaldo, ‘Let me weep over my cruel fate, and that I long for freedom’.

The composer’s immaculately written booklet notes provide fascinating details about the inner workings of the music while Guerrero and his virtuoso orchestra supply the horsepower and the passion.