Music / Young Voices of America, Rachel Mink and the Ellery String Quartet. At Wesley Uniting Church, November 24. Reviewed by ROB KENNEDY.

A concert by soprano Rachel Mink and the Ellery String Quartet offered a blueprint of the diversity of musicians working in the US now.

A regular performer with Luminescence Chamber Choir, Mink has a voice that sways and swoons a listener. Her refined tonal subtleties are evident in everything she sings.

This was shown in the opening work, Aaron Mencher’s Atmospheres of the Night, which was a world premiere. With Brad Tham, violin, Anika Chan, violin, Pippa Newman, viola, and Chloe Law on cello, make up the Ellery String Quartet.

With artistic advisor Roland Peelman conducting, through harmonics on the strings, and Mink’s soprano voice, we found out how appropriately titled this work was. Its atmospheric nature filled most of this composition. In an entanglement of sound, this mysterious work used many effects to create its setting. Mink was called upon to express penetrating highs and lows and lyrics of great volume.

As a cycle of three movements, The Moon, Venus and Conjunction, they all read and sounded like poetry in a combination of dissonance and consonance mixed with some beautiful vocal lines. Yet the music strongly reflected the atonalism that I thought had passed many years ago, yet the performance was to be admired.

For just string quartet, Caroline Shaw’s Plan and Elevation is a sensitive work. Its musical ideas are many. There’s an interweaving of tonalities, but all in one style. And that’s the style of Caroline Shaw. While difficult to articulate, this and many of her compositions feel fresh and alive with new ideas.

Next, in a cycle of three songs, and an Australian premiere, Shaw’s work By and By. With lyrics by Eliza Hewitt for Will There be any Stars in my Crown (1897), then O Death with lyrics by Lloyd Chandler (1920) and I’ll Fly Away (1929), with lyrics attributed to Albert Brumley. These three songs again show the ingenuity of this “in-demand” composer.

Filled with distinctive American sounds, this American-born singer produced something that, as she said, what she grew up with, which was a combination of the lyrical, simple, evocative, and welcoming music from America.

The final two songs by Kishi Bashi, Bittersweet Genesis for Him AND Her and This Must Be the Place (after Talking Heads), were a combination of uplifting pop sounds in a classical setting.

Mink’s voice fits many styles, but whatever it is she sings, her refined and specific sound quality is worth travelling far and wide to hear. To prove her exceptional vocal ability, she encored with a solo version of a blues work titled Up Above My Head I Hear Music in the Air.