Crux Duo, New York-based Australian pianist Lisa Moore and brilliant young Melbourne clarinetist Lloyd Van’t Hoff, was born out of a collaboration for the 2023 Sydney Festival, and with this debut album we have a significant addition to Australia’s already impressive catalogue of chamber music groups. It features works by three Australians and four Americans, either written for or arranged for the duo, finishing with Leonard Bernstein’s youthful Clarinet Sonata.

Detroit composer Harriet Steinke’s five-movement Rituals is a fine opener with its nods to minimalism bookending serene lyrical inner movements. Titled Practice, Chorales, Canons, More Canons and Requiem, Steinke wrote one movement each day at the beginning of 2023.

Both musicians get solo works. Van’t Hoff evokes birdsong in a beautiful adaptation of Nick Russoniello’s Dawn Searching, written originally for soprano saxophone. And Moore both plays and vocalises in Erik Griswold’s intriguing Danny Boy adrift in the rising tide.

New Yorker Martin Bresnick, who was featured in Moore’s Sydney recital last year, rearranged his setting of “sweatshop poet” Morris Rosenfeld’s Mayn Rue Plats (My Resting Place), describing the miseries of working in 1920s New York’s garment industry, for his contribution. Aussie Anne Cawrse’s adaptation of two settings from a 2009 song cycle – one a DH Lawrence poem, the other by Chidiock Tichborne – and Elena Kats-Chernin’s much-loved Russian Rag, best known as the theme tune to Phillip Adams’ Late Night Live ABC radio program, complete the setlist.

There’s great charm and chemistry about this duo. Hopefully there’s lots more to come.