By Jonathan Blumhofer

Violinist Augustin Hadelich and pianist Orion Weiss prove that there is plenty of music written on these shores to explore, especially when you are not limited by region or style. Soprano Karen Slack and pianist Michelle Cann demonstrate the strength of Florence Price’s songs and arrangements.

The problem with many recordings surveying American music is that the field of programmatic vision on offer is either myopic or too conservative – or, sometimes, both. Too often, for instance, these jaunts involve Antonin Dvorak.

There’s no Dvorak, though, on American Road Trip, from the duo of violinist Augustin Hadelich and pianist Orion Weiss, and it’s a better album because of it. Wonderful composer though he is, the Czech’s absence helps the pair entirely sidestep the aforementioned issues. As it turns out, there’s plenty of music written on these shores to explore and, when you’re not limited by region or style, so much the better. The results here sound brilliant – Hadelich and Weiss evince terrific chemistry throughout – and, more often than not, like lots of fun.

The disc’s big items – Charles Ives’s Violin Sonata No. 4, Stephen Hartke’s Netsuke, and John Adams’s Road Movies – offer spades of variety between them.

The Ives, subtitled “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting,” traffics in quotations and musical scene painting. If one isn’t quite familiar with its references to “Jesus Loves Me” and “Shall We Gather at the River,” not to worry: Hadelich and Weiss ensure the mix of delirium and playfulness in the outer movements comes out strongly, and they’ve got a very clear sense of what the line is and where it’s going in the affecting central Largo.

Unexpectedly, given the album’s larger context, Netsuke alludes to Japanese miniature sculptures. Its six movements lean into various extended techniques and gritty textures, though the concluding “Jewel of Wisdom with mountain pavilions” offers repose in the form of chiming, bell-like piano chords and a shimmering violin line.

Adams’s Road Movies, on the other hand, channels motoric figurations in its outer thirds and languorous, bluesy ones in the middle. Hadelich and Weiss have its full measure, delivering Movies’ taut passagework with lean precision (and, on the violinist’s part, impressively warm G-string tone) and ably teasing out the motivic threads that tie together the meditative central one.

The remainder of the album’s offerings are (relatively) short and eclectic, yet they somehow all hold together. There’s a soaring account of “Somewhere” from West Side Story and a rowdy one of the “Hoe-Down” from Copland’s Rodeo. Amy Beach’s sweet, limpid Romance comes off appealingly, as does Jascha Heifetz’s arrangement of Manuel Ponce’s Estrellita.

Hadelich and Weiss are equally at home in less formal fare. They clearly have a blast with Eddie South’s Black Gypsy, languorous and soulful to start, snapping and stylish to end. Similarly vigorous is William Kroll’s Banjo and Fiddle.

Perhaps most impressive, though, is Hadelich’s form in solo rep. His take on Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Louisiana Blues Strut swaggers and he shreds Daniel Bernard Roumain’s stormy, athletic Filter.

Best, though, is the violinist’s arrangement of Howdy Forrester’s Wild Fiddler’s Rag. A note from Hadelich in the album’s booklet thanks his young daughter for making sure this setting was “good enough to dance to.” Whether or not you break out your dancing shoes when listening to it, his performance rollicks.

The Florence Price Renaissance of the last few years has tended to focus on the composer’s large-scale efforts at the expense of her songs and arrangements. Understandable though this tack is, it doesn’t always showcase the composer in the best light.

Price was a gifted and important figure in American music, yes, but she was most at home writing smaller scale forms and for voice and/or piano, as Beyond the Years, a new compendium from soprano Karen Slack and pianist Michelle Cann, demonstrates. Though not comprehensive – Price composed somewhere around 150 songs – the nineteen selections offered here give a sense of the breadth of her literary interests and also her easy, unpretentious way with both instruments.

Most of the poets on the present disc were contemporaries of the composer, many of them affiliated with the Harlem Renaissance (Price, as Rae Linda Brown’s biography points out, was an active member of Chicago’s thriving, Black cultural scene, with connections that spanned the country). Others are a bit surprising. There are two settings of Byron and one by Theodore Roosevelt scholar Hermann Hagedorn.

All of them demonstrate Price’s fluency with text setting and her considerable skill filling out keyboard accompaniments. Sometimes her writing recalls her European contemporaries: “Desire” and “Song is So Old” evoke, in their ways, Richard Strauss. “There Be None” offers some phrasings and melodic turns that vaguely recall moments in Arnold Schoenberg’s Brettl-lieder (that’s probably coincidental: it’s unlikely Price would have known Schoenberg’s 1901 cabaret songs, which weren’t published until after her death).

Some, like “I Remember” and “Interim,” are stormily passionate. Others, like “Who Grope with Love For Hand” and “The Dawn’s Awake,” stride purposefully. Yet more tap the vein of Rodgers & Hart: “What do I care for Morning?” and the lilting “Spring” might have fit neatly into a Broadway show of the ‘30s or ‘40s. Same for the charming “Your Leafy Voice.”

Through all of them, Slack and Cann are knowing guides. The occasionally high-lying vocal lines hold the former no terrors; the soprano navigates them all with easy confidence. And the clarity of Cann’s pianism always impresses. Azica’s sonics are bright and well-balanced.

Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.