Moonwork is that rare staged concert where the staging is an argument about the music rather than an apology for it. The hall goes dark before a note is played; the light, when it arrives, belongs to the score — Voss's Selenography brightens and wanes on a twenty-seven-minute cycle, and the ensemble plays inside it from memory.

What keeps this from preciousness is the playing. Ensemble Selene is an octet that phrases like a quartet and balances like a wind band, and Night Soil's tape part was mixed into the room so exactly that I twice turned to see who else was on stage.

By the time the house lights rose for the curtain call — the one theatrical flourish the group permits itself — the audience had been listening in the dark for over an hour, and nobody had coughed. That is not an atmosphere. That is attention, earned.

An hour of night music without a single lullaby: Selenography on record keeps all the danger of the staged version and adds a hi-fi's worth of detail. Recording over three live nights was a gamble — Voss's score leaves nowhere to hide an edit — and it pays off in a continuity of pulse no patched studio account would have.

The Deme Nocturnes make an ideal foil, four short rooms after Voss's single long corridor. Aphelion's production keeps the hall audible around the players, which is exactly right for music that is partly about being awake in a building at night.