A most welcome addition to the slim Samuel Adams discography, ‘Current’ gathers three chamber music works from the past decade, two of them from the ‘before times’ and the other directly reflecting the experience of the pandemic. The integration of acoustic and electronic sounds to generate music that poignantly plugs into the zeitgeist justifies the album’s multivalent title. Adams shows himself to be among the most interesting composers of the millennial generation in his negotiation of the tensions that shape and define his musical narratives: between directness and implication, silence and resonance, emotion and its aftermath.

The centrepiece is the five-movement Current (2016 19) for string quartet and four resonating snare drums triggered remotely from a laptop. Adams creates a spellbinding mutation of the genre that touches on the contemporary sublime in its patient fusions of warm, natural string harmonies and artificial sonic colours that are just beyond the horizon of the familiar. The Spektral Quartet, who commissioned the work and are its dedicatees, weave a long-range spell from Adams’s subtle repetitions and ecstatic pulsations, attentive to his large-scale architecture and moment-by-moment revelations alike. So ideal is the match that this documentation of their partnership has an added elegiac dimension, the Chicago-based Spektral having exited the stage last year to pursue their individual paths.

Violin Diptych, the most recent work on the album, originated as an intimate response to the limitations imposed by the first lockdowns in spring 2020. Adams contributed the violin soliloquy ‘Playing Changes’ to a collective project pairing his wife Helen Kim (currently the Seattle Symphony’s associate concertmaster) with a solo dancer. He later added the mirror movement ‘Changes Move’ for violin and piano, supplemented with electronic resonance samples triggered from the keyboard. Even as a purely auditory experience shorn of the original visual context, Karen Gomyo’s account – Orphic in the first panel, Ariel-like in the second – is winged with yearning memories of the ground above which her instrument soars.

Conor Hanick, the pianist on Violin Diptych and a like-minded colleague for whom Adams composed his remarkable piano concerto No Such Spring (2022), likewise defies gravity in Shade Studies (2014). Written as a tribute to Terry Riley, the piece unfolds as a dialogue between solo piano and electronic samples resonating from a speaker tucked beneath the lid of the instrument. Through hymnal cadences that pirouette into reverent silence, Hanick lifts us into a state of raptly attentive contemplation and clarifying simplicity.