There’s something seductively sinewy and sensuously gritty about Gavin Higgins’ chamber music that sets the still-young English composer out as one of the most interesting voices of his generation. Turning 40 next year, Higgins spent his 30s gathering acclaim for attention-grabbing ballet scores, award-winning orchestral works, his first opera and a continuing commitment to a family-inherited brass music tradition dating back to the late 19th century.

Gavin Higgins

Ekstasis offers first recordings of four very different, distinct chamber works, composed between 2015 and 2021, that reveal Higgins as an artisan craftsman of tightly threaded textures loosely, lyrically woven. The disc’s five-part title piece for string sextet (the Piatti Quartet joined by Sara Roberts’ viola and cellist David Cohen) explores various experiences of ecstasy from delirium to atomised introspection with a variegated, dexterously employed palette. By turns hallucinogenic, epiphanic and meditative, it is a remarkable work, superbly executed by a tightly reciprocal ensemble.

Cohen and the Piattis also feature in Gursky Landscapes, a response to images by the German photographer Andreas Gursky. Higgins is keenly responsive to his striking sources, visuals metamorphosing into...