With Conjure, British-American composer Freya Waley-Cohen weaves a tapestry of the mystical and the mundane, unfolding like an arcane grimoire, each work an incantation that draws listeners into spaces between reality and enchantment.

The piece opens the recording with an intimate séance for string trio, Tamsin Waley-Cohen (violin), Anne Beilby (viola), Nathaniel Boyd (cello), summoning spectral harmonies that flicker at the edges of perception. This supernatural dialogue gives way to Talisman, where the 13 strings of the Manchester Collective, treated as individual voices, create a complex ritual of sound, their interweaving lines suggesting the inexorable force of nature breaking through human constraints. The following Naiad, dedicated to the memory of composer and conductor Oliver Knussen, is, in the composer’s own words, “constructed a bit like lace, with tiny details in delicate patterns creating a larger pattern or picture when you look at it from further away.”

The heart of the album however lies in Spell Book, a cycle of nine incantations set to Rebecca Tamás’...