If you missed Tarik O’Regan’s acclaimed chamber opera Heart of Darkness, here’s a welcome opportunity to hear some of its luminous beauty. O’Regan has taken his majestic, brooding score for Tom Phillips’s subtle retelling of the brutal Conrad story and made a suite for orchestra that glows with the same jewel-like warmth that pervades the title piece on this disc, A Celestial Map of the Sky. Bright young voices bring both energetic and ethereal life to the poetry of, among others, Whitman and Hopkins, describing Earth’s relation to the infinite heavens and movingly reminding us to look beyond the boundaries of this weary world.
