Like many musicians, harpist Tanya Houghton’s life and career have been peripatetic, moving between countries and meeting fellow creatives along the way. This album pays tribute to those chance encounters – the connections she has made, which have sparked more enduring relationships.

Houghton met composer and fellow harpist Caroline Lizotte in Paris, and opens this album with her Suite Galactique, an atmospheric work with a dark sound world that expands over its three movements, employing a range of the instrument’s textures.

We then move on to a run of pieces for harp with voice, featuring accompaniments transcribed for the harp. The Interlude’ from Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols gives way to the traditional Irish song, The Last Rose of Summer seamlessly – a clever bit of programming that showcases both the harp’s sweet lyricism, and its rougher, more punctuated capabilities.

The balance is surprising, with the harp often prioritised in the mix over the ‘solo’ part. While this is frequently an effective technique – highlighting the arpeggiated patterns in Houghton and mezzo-soprano Jenny Bourke’s wonderfully sensitive interpretation of Howells’s King David, for instance – it occasionally detracts from the sense of musical cohesion between the two players. William Alwyn’s Naiades, written for flute and harp, is by nature a virtuosic duet rather than a solo-with-accompaniment: it calls for an equal-handed approach to create a genuine sense of conversation.

A more transparent balance in the recording would have aided this dialogue enormously.