Portrait: Alex Baranowski

Star violinist Angèle Dubeau’s unstinting support of contemporary music is encapsulated in a series of “Portrait” albums that began with Philip Glass in 2008 and has now reached its sixth volume with Alex Baranowski, a graduate of Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. What started out as a single commission for Wiosna (“Spring”) has expanded into an album of 15 pieces, written or arranged specifically for Dubeau and her gifted band of players, La Pietà. Refreshingly free of chest-beating histrionics, Baranowski’s music is intimate, mesmerising, sometimes playful, meditative, gloriously tonal and deeply felt. Structured primarily from a series of heightened and then gently resolved harmonic suspensions, with Dubeau spinning a golden web of sound above, it’s one of those rare albums that activates the musical gooseflesh on contact.