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The Guardian 0

China meets Chicago, and British song cycles flourish, in new releases from the Civitas Ensemble, Riot Ensemble and Counterpoise

• Mixing different musical styles used to be called crossover. No one much liked the word. The Civitas Ensemble – three top players from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the head of piano at Chicago College of Performing Arts – describes itself as cross-disciplinary: a happier and more transparent term. On Jin Yin (Çedille), the ensemble has brought together five world premiere recordings with a Chinese thread running through. Lu Pei’s Scenes Through a Window forges Chinese folk music and American rap. Zhou Long’s Five Elements – metal, wood, water, fire and earth – draws on the components held by the ancients to form the physical universe. In Emanations of Tara, a substantial, rhapsodic work inspired by the composer’s visit to Tibet, Yao Chen gives prominence to the pipa and prayer bowl. The results are subtle and rewardingly unfamiliar.

• The Riot Ensemble unites stylistically divergent composers, all but one in their 30s, on Song Offerings: British Song Cycles (Deutschlandfunk). The title comes from a work by Jonathan Harvey (1939-2012), four settings of texts by Rabindranath Tagore full of longing, joy and the embrace of death, sung with vivid expression by soprano Sarah Dacey. Harvey’s benign spirit hovers elsewhere: Aaron Holloway-Nahum’s Plane Sailing (from a poem by Sasha Dugdale), delicate and detailed, was written shortly before Harvey’s death, and is dedicated to him: a sorrowful lament about a fading life “frail as a cloud”. Laurence Osborn’s Micrographia, in which Dacey is joined by soprano April Frederick, delights in the wondrous microscopic world of the 17th-century natural philosopher Robert Hooke (text by poet Joseph Minden). Three songs by Samantha Fernando complete this well-balanced disc.