Johan Farjot’s sensuous chamber music, influenced by the rhythmic insistence of American minimalism and the tenderness of French post-Romanticism, conjures vivid portraits of love in all its breathless beauty. David Tepfer’s often passionate poetry, taken from a series of novels inspired by Japanese landscapes, coaxes gentle washes of colour from Fargot, as a couple tentatively explore their love for one another. At the heart of this mesmerising album is the song cycle Lovescapes; with its iridescent music that rises and falls with the mountainous terrain, it culminates in the stormy “Worldly Encounters” and the exquisite “Maiden”, which harks back to the golden age of the French chanson. In the six Shikoku Songs, shimmering piano textures paint images of burgeoning love in a Japanese spring with “IV. The Greening Earth” forming its intimate core.