The music of Craig Madden Morris (b1945 in New York; not to be confused with the Grammy-nominated trumpeter, b1968 in Texas) has featured on several albums from Navona and its sister label, Ravello. His music is expressively conservative, tonal and lyrical in idiom, generally easy on the ear – at least superficially, although there is an undertow of complexity in some of his works. The three choral pieces Love through the Years, performed very neatly by The Composer’s Choir under Daniel Shaw, are one such: three unconnected settings of disparate texts by Emily Dickinson and from the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, united by a common sensibility. The latter two were originally composed as separate works in 2010 with piano accompaniment; ‘I had no time to hate’ seems to have been composed after 2015, the last date for any composition on the composer’s website. (Indeed, I have not been able to track down dates of any of the companion works.) The pieces were recorded separately at the same location in Connecticut 11 years apart (2010 21!) but Navona has not attempted to equalise the acoustical pictures, so the triptych changes sonic perspective as it proceeds, not entirely happily.

The rest of the programme comprises chamber and instrumental works recorded in New York in June 2022, framed by two for orchestra set down in Ostrava (Czechia) 10 weeks earlier. The Elegy was commissioned by the Ridgeway Symphony (in which Morris plays) to commemorate a violinist colleague who committed suicide. A complex piece, incorporating sections depicting grief, a violin solo (presumably depicting its subject) and a faster, upbeat section which I assume is a something of a character portrait. The title-track, Kaleidoscope, is a three-movement string quartet of no mean achievement if ultra-conservative manner. Morris’s gift for wistfulness emerges in the remaining works, not least the concluding Romance, nicely played by Libor Suchý, and in another triptych, Reflections for piano, pleasantly rendered by Jun Cho. The Gentle Path, for violin and piano, would make a lovely encore, delightfully played here by Cho accompanying Eric Silberger.