‘Enigma’ is the Greek word for ‘riddle’, ‘mystery’, ‘secret’. At the moment of entering or leaving life, there is always a sound: the cry of a newborn baby or the last sigh of a dying person giving up the ghost. Soprano Sarah Aristidou sets out in search of the original sound in this programme, which opens with Andreas Tsiartas’s Lamento Turco . The voice emerges from silence in a wordless lament on the vowel ‘A’.

Austrian composer Thomas Larcher’s new album features premiere recordings of three strongly contrasting works. The Times has hailed Larcher’s music as a world “of haunting landscapes and dreams, stylistically disparate but fused by the composer’s astonishing ear and quizzical attitude to traditional forms”, a description borne out by the compositions here. The Living Mountain, for soprano and ensemble, draws upon the memoir of the Scottish poet and nature writer Nan Shepherd. Unerzählt is an intimate song cycle for baritone and piano, deploying texts of German writer W.G. Sebald. And Ouroboros, named for the serpent of eternity, is a powerful piece for cello and chamber orchestra. Recorded in Munich and Weerberg in 2021 and 2022 and produced by Manfred Eicher, The Living Mountain is the fourth New Series album of Larcher’s compositions.