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Lance Hulme’s music has been described as chameleonic, but perhaps the most illuminating description is one from Die Rheinpfalz that accentuates his eclecticism, playfulness, and deft coupling of ‘serious’ and vernacular music. All such elements emerge during Leaps & Bounds, a double-CD, 110-minute collection performed by a large array of soloists and ensembles. On production grounds alone, the project impresses for assembling so many artists to perform Hulme’s material. The result is a recording that provides as encompassing a portrait of a composer as any single release conceivably could.

Such eclecticism came early and naturally to Hulme, who studied at the Yale University School of Music, the Eastman School of Music, the University of Minnesota, and the Universität für Musik in Vienna. While studying classical composition as an undergraduate, he played keyboards in a number of jazz and pop groups and also wrote and directed musicals and stage music. A stint playing keyboards for a jazz-fusion band called Dreamscape preceded his relocation to Vienna, and during an eighteen-year European stay he co-founded and directed the eclectic chamber ensemble Ensemble Surprise. In 2003, an offer to teach returned him to the United States, where he’s currently a music professor at North Carolina Central University.

Perhaps no piece on the album reflects his playfulness better than JethroZen, aptly titled in blending the prog rock-inspired flute of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and the meditative quality associated with the Japanese shakuhachi. A title such as JethroZen might prompt one to think An Eternal Flame might be a possible re-imagining of The Bangle’s hit, but, in fact, it’s an affectingly sombre setting dedicated to the people of Ukraine and titled after a poem by Alicia Richards. Leaps & Bounds is the kind of project where the folk-inflected Appalachian Advent sits comfortably alongside a saxophone sonata and a setting whose electroacoustic elements bring medieval chanting into the present age. Bolstering the listener’s appreciation of Hulme’s writing are performances by orchestras, ensembles, and solo musicians that are poised and finessed.

Inspired by Homer’s The Odyssey, Sirens Song inaugurates the collection with a symphonic triptych performed by the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra under Mikel Toms’ direction. The fifteen-minute work advances without pause through “Distance Voices,”“Dire Straits,” and “The Beckoning Horizon,” Hulme’s cheekiness evident in a central title that also nods to a certain Mark Knopfler-led rock group. The orchestration seems a homage of sorts to the grand symphonic tradition associated with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the sensibility is very much of its time. The blustery opening movement establishes tension and foreboding when melodic fragments and percussive flourishes interlace to foreshadow epic battles to come. With the agitated “Dire Straits,” all hell breaks loose, and the orchestra surges furiously as the full measure of its torrential power’s unleashed. Things settle down for “The Beckoning Horizon,” though there’s still action aplenty as the music brings a wizened perspective to the long journey undertaken by Odysseus and his men.

Delivered by nine saxophonists and the composer conducting, Wildcat is titled after an all-wood rollercoaster in Youngstown, Ohio that Hulme and his father enjoyed. Given such subject matter, the music’s understandably teeming with joy, abandon, and abrupt twists and turns; it’s not difficult to picture the wild trajectory of the rollercoaster when Hulme’s writing is so visually suggestive. Another composition that grew out of family history is Appalachian Advent, its three parts performed with sensitivity by mezzo-soprano Clara O’Brien and pianist James Douglass. Hulme’s grandfather was an Appalachian fiddler, and the composer’s affection for the region’s folk music is sincerely felt in these song settings. His love of saxophone re-emerges at album’s end when soprano saxist Susan Fancher partners with pianist James Douglass on the four-part sonata Sax Attractor, its name alluding to a phenomenon in mathematics whereby random numbers eventually migrate to the same sub-set. Hulme’s applied the concept by having musical materials gradually gravitate to a shared set of intervals and pitches, but no degree in mathematics is needed to appreciate the interplay between the duo in a work that ranges from a solemn adagio to a hocket-styled toccata.

Merging ponderous pizzicato with bowed statements that lament and soar, violinist Ida Bieler imbues her moving rendering of An Eternal Flame with intense feeling. With guitarist John Covach joining flutist Erika Boysen, JethroZen could pass for a distant cousin to Tull’s Bourrée—at least until her adventurous call-and-response with Covach amplifies the shakuhachi connection. Caritas Abundat: Setting the Diamond updates a Hildegard von Bingen hymn by embedding it within an electroacoustic context of tinkling bells, burbling mountain streams, Timothy Holley’s cello, and O’Brien’s meditative musings. The titular work reinstates an orchestral dimension in featuring the University of Maryland Wind Orchestra and conductor Michael Votta performing a dynamic piece animated by an insistent rhythmic ostinato and florid interplay between brass and woodwinds sections.

Elsewhere, the set includes a busy, high-energy chamber ensemble piece called Bonfire Bacchanalthat one could possibly mistake for a Michael Torke creation. The chamber dimension carries over into Anna’s Candle, its title inspired by Anna Karenina and the work itself indebted to the music of Harrison Birtwistle and delivered with contrapuntal artfulness by flutist Laura Stevens, clarinetist Anthony Taylor, and cellist Alexander Ezerman. Having written the vibraphone solo piece Slapdashfor one of his graduate students, Hulme decided to rewrite it for two vibraphones, hence the title Slapdash Redux and the sparkling rendition presented here by Gabriele Petracco and Marko Jugovic.If there’s a downside to Leaps & Bounds, it’s that in being so encompassing one might conclude no other recordings of Hulme’s are necessary. That would be a mistake, however, as while it is comprehensive, earlier releases of his music on Albany, Bridge, Divine Arts, and others show that Leaps & Bounds forms but a part (if a substantial one) of a larger picture. That a seventeen-year gap separates his Albany release, Flame Dance, and his latest also indicates that considerable ground has been covered since the earlier one; that, in turn, would seem to suggest that the new collection is a much more accurate portrait of the music Hulme’s creating now.