Recorded live at Melbourne Recital Centre’s intimate performance space the Salon, this inventive program of compositions, elaborations, improvisations and collaborations seems purpose-built for late-night listening of the more sophisticated variety.

Built around pianist Tony Gould and cellist Imogen Manins’ musical meanderings (in a good way) and conversations, Such a Sky explores written and improvised responses to various composers’ works in different styles and through varying textures, the latter lent more variety by the duo’s fellow performers. Thus vocalist Gian Slater lends a lissome, spectral quality to the folklike title track, in which Manins takes off from the song Who Will Buy? From Lionel Bart’s Oliver!; this same disembodied quality is also present as Slater’s looped voice is used as a drone in an effective arrangement of Michael Atherton’s Shall We Dream?, originally for children’s choir. In Gould’s appropriately bluesy setting of WH Auden’s Funeral Blues Slater is more visceral and affecting.

Slava Grigoryan’s guitar brings welcome colour and texture to Manins and Gould’s freely expressive playing in three works, two of which – Claus Ogerman’s Valse and Gould’s Johann & Igor – are based on the music of JS Bach (the other is Jobim’s song, Luiza).

Colour and texture, but also a...