"Time and Distance" was well received by music writers. Laurence Vittes of "Gramophone" praised Abel’s “marriages of subtly charged music with an eclectic modernist twist to emotionally provocative, introspective texts.” Gregory Berg of "The Journal of Singing" called Abel “a composer with bold and ambitious ideas and the resourcefulness to nearly always bring those ideas to full and effective fruition. His latest collection … marks a new level of excellence we have not seen before.” Theodore Bell of "CultureSpot LA" wrote: “The collection has a unique L.A. sound and attitude … . Abel’s settings fuse chamber and contemporary styles seamlessly together to achieve a spacious feel with only a small ensemble.” Huntley Dent of "Fanfare" observed: “Few current songwriters rival Abel’s intriguing texts and their reach into so many psychological and cultural issues. Meaning and melody go hand in hand in a very contemporary way, which I truly admire.” Enthused Joseph Newsome of "Voix-des-Arts": “Too plentiful to enumerate are the passages in this music that are so wrenchingly private that they may compel the listener to ask, ‘How can this man whom I have never met know so much about my life?’ This intuition, uncanny and unifying, is the foundation of Abel’s unique musical language and the quality that makes "Time and Distance" a disc that severs new veins of raw emotion each time that it is heard.” Abel has shifted focus for his fifth Delos release, "The Cave of Wondrous Voice", offering a program dominated by chamber music. Three American masters of the idiom – David Shifrin, Fred Sherry, and Carol Rosenberger – introduce Abel’s Clarinet Trio and “Intuition’s Dance,” while German violinist Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker and young American pianist Dominic Cheli perform “The Elastic Hours.” Hila Plitmann makes her fifth traversal of an Abel work in the song cycle “Four Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva,” accompanied by Rosenberger and English hornist Sarah Beck. The piece is the first setting of the Russian poet in English, with translations by Alyssa Dinega Gillespie.