By Jonathan Blumhofer

Rebekah Heller’s new album celebrates the instrument’s power, agility, and surprising expressive breadth.

Rightly or wrongly, the bassoon doesn’t usually figure as a flashy solo instrument. But maybe Rebekah Heller’s Righteous Rage can help change that perception.

A bassoonist and conductor with a long association with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Heller has made an album that is as much a celebration of herself as of her instrument—and there’s no question she’s a brilliant musician. Or that she possesses strong programming sensibilities: Rage consists of a set of works written especially for the artist, as well as a pair of new arrangements of preexisting scores by Julius Eastman and Steve Reich.

Its most substantial item, in terms of duration if not expressive scope (and it may well qualify on that count, too), is Eastman’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc. Originally conceived for solo voice and ten cellos, this 1981 work has in recent years been granted a new lease on life thanks to Claire Jensen’s 2016 arrangement for cello ensemble (the original score was lost). Heller’s version draws on that iteration.

Though one might miss some of the impact of string double-stops in her edition, Heller’s performance compensates with biting physicality and a textural clarity that only eleven bassoons—all played by the album’s star—can deliver. By turns punchy, sensuous, raucous, and serene, what emerges is music of absorbing textural, rhythmic, and coloristic variety. Eastman, who died in poverty in 1990, remains something of an outlier in the canon. But he was a composer with a distinctive, approachable point of view, and this recording admirably serves his legacy.

There’s a bit of overlap, at least in terms of energy and persistence, between Holy Presence and Brittany J. Green’s title track. Taut and explosive, her score is a high-flying, virtuosic vehicle that bristles with the urgency of our times: feisty, unsettled, not going quietly into the night.

Fay Victor’s Nurture (for Ingram), on the other hand, mixes meditative elements with playful moments—though there’s a complexity to the latter that lends those episodes unexpected depth. Heller has its wide expressive range well in hand, especially the passages of extended techniques that periodically evoke, or seem to evoke, sounds of nature.

A similar quality is to be found in Jessie Cox’s Sonic Cartographies, which digs even more deeply into the instrument’s extended capabilities. As in the Eastman, there’s an almost corporeal presence to this brooding soundscape, its beating overtones, clacking keys, and clouds of sound suggesting something eerie and nature-like (or is it man intruding on nature?). Either way, this is music both defiantly abstract and intensely immediate.

Meanwhile, Reich’s Grand Street Counterpoint, a reworking of his Cello Counterpoint, offers 11-plus minutes of relief. Brash and playful, Heller’s account really bops, if anything, calling to mind Pat Metheny’s ecstatic original recording of Electric Counterpoint.

The whole undertaking, then, is both an exuberant celebration of the instrument and a survey of some of the breadth of contemporary music. At its impressive best, the album offers an effective demonstration of the various ways in which composers engage with the world as they see it: Victor’s effort is partly a tribute to the jazz artist Ingram Washington, while Green’s wrestles with her reflections on a host of pressing issues—ecological, social, and gender-related.

Taken together, Rage is an affecting 60-minute portrait that’s singular in concept yet diverse in content. If less than diverse in instrumentation, well, that’s no complaint: the bassoon’s rarely sounded so impressive and versatile as it does here.

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.