Margaret Brouwer covers a lot of emotional territory in the music on her new CD, ‘Reactions’, which comprises works composed between 2005 and 2020, including one written in the throes of the pandemic. The American composer has the expressive skills to evoke the passions she sets out to describe – love, ecology, racism, even being trapped in telephone hell.

Rhapsodic Sonata (2011, rev 2016) is a three-movement work for viola and piano in which Brouwer’s musical language – tonal with deft sprinklings of harmonic spice – draws the instruments into ardent and wistful conversations. The viola is temperamental in the extended first movement, ‘Cáritas’, with its hint of a Gregorian chant, and loving and impish in the shorter two movements. Eliesha Nelson plays the viola part with penetrating focus and beauty, and pianist Shuai Wang is equally sensitive to the music’s changing moods.

In Declaration (2005), Brouwer takes up subjects ‘addressing violence and war and the equality of all people’, as the composer writes, to texts by Ann Woodward, Thomas Jefferson, David Adams and herself. The word-painting in every case is vivid and often surprising, as in the almost defiant setting of an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence. Mezzo-soprano Sarah Beaty, violinist Mari Sato and pianist Wang bring these narratives to vibrant life.

The stresses of the pandemic and the scourge of inequality are depicted in fervent terms in I Cry – Summer 2020, which Sato and Wang give an intensely compelling performance. The Lake (2019), set to Brouwer’s own text, is both a poetic show of gratitude and a plea to wake up to climate change, shaped with subtle urgency by tenor Brian Skoog and pianist Wang.

Sato goes it alone in the satirical All Lines Are Still Busy (2019), in which the violinist practises, contributes phone effects, and fumes while being kept on hold. It’s a vexing exercise in futility the rest of us know all too well.