>Like most earthlings during the coronavirus pandemic, Louis Karchin had an inordinate amount of time on his hands. He responded by immersing himself in creative projects, including new compositions and revisions of previous pieces. A healthy number of those scores make their presence felt on this recording of works featuring keyboards and winds. They reveal a composer with an inventive sense of narrative design and instrumental possibility, as well as the ability to convey musical messages with succinct elegance.

Two of the piano works hail from the first year of the pandemic, but they eschew any degree of despair. The Sonata-Fantasia is a feast of keyboard adventure, with striking contrasts of register, texture and harmonic implication. Glistening figures rub shoulders with heraldic pronouncements and darting activity. In Three Images, Karchin deftly employs tone-painting and atmospheric writing to evoke the subjects: ‘Festival’, ‘Labyrinths’ and ‘Carousel’. Both works receive brilliant accounts – Stephen Drury in the former and Michael Stephen Brown in the latter.

A Jersey Reverie on New York Notes (2018), the only piece entirely predating the pandemic, pays tribute to the 80th birthday of Charles Wuorinen by incorporating bits of his New York Notes into a stately, ruminative unfolding of ideas, which pianist Han Chen shapes with meticulous urgency. Processions, a 2021 revision of a 2007 work for organ, is a sonorous burst of arpeggiated flourishes, majestic sonorities and pungent details that seize the ears as offered by Carson Cooman.

Karchin could never be accused of throwing caution to the winds in the disc’s remaining pieces. Summer Song (1994, rev 2021) gives the vibrant Marianne Gythfeldt the opportunity to travel the extremes of her clarinet through athletic flights and birdlike poetry. The four-movement Quintet for Winds (2021) juxtaposes pastoral gestures sometimes redolent of Milhaud with a host of playful and lyrical interactions, as well as a brief foray into clarinet multiphonics. The members of Windscape play Karchin’s score to the fresh hilt.