Hans Abrahamsen’s music is always divining, assimilating, shaking down – seeking the truth by returning to the same places over and over. For his Ten Sinfonias, composed in 2010, Abrahamsen returned to his first string quartet of 1973, Ten Preludes. The subsequent work is less an arrangement, more an unlocking of various latent structural elements that the original scoring partially concealed. For his new version, the composer let the tonal structure of the work control the orchestration. Thus brass only play the partials of the C major tonality – a tonality that, in any case, is only revealed in No 10, Presto con spirito.

The result, paradoxically, is a more expressionistic piece than Abrahamsen might have delivered had he given himself free rein. No 5, Adagio mesto, feels unusually harmonically loaded for this composer, though the minimalism of No 8, Con movimento ma sempre pesante e rigoroso, and unisons of No 9, Largo nobilmente, show, again, what he can do on a shoestring.

That is true of the composer’s piano concerto for the left hand Left, Alone (2014‑15; Abrahamsen himself has limited use of his right hand). This piece reveals more of itself over time, in contrast to the immediately dazzling let me tell you (the exception to that general Abrahamsian rule – 3/16). Again, the work feels like a quest for viability, workability, coalescence. And again, a Spartan poetic logic underpins all. There are glimpses of The Snow Queen and let me tell you, though it’s probably Schnee we’re hearing – the geometric map for so much of the composer’s subsequent music.

I’d say this second recording has the upper hand over that from the dedicatee Alexandre Tharaud under Yannick Nézet-Séguin (Erato, 3/20) – clearer, slightly drier (probably on purpose) and altogether more stringent, despite the fact that we hear everything with a degree more perspective. I think that’s how Abrahamsen hears it; that the frantic activity of Prestissimo tempestuoso is happening somewhere far enough away for it to absolutely not demand the attention; that the valedictory snowstorm capping the last movement with the tempo instruction ‘Suddenly in flying time – Fairy-Tale Time’ is seen as if from the warm side of the window. Stefanovich has the measure of the composer’s fragility and gentle patter, as do Chiacchiarini and the WDR Symphony Orchestra.

Abrahamsen’s eloquence on the subject of ‘time’, in every sense, is even more obvious in his Two Pieces in a Slow Time – versions of his first (1983) and last (1986) Studies for Piano reimagined for brass and percussion. Here, a different, non-decaying instrumental timbre is used to deaden velocity by necessity. The second piece, in particular, stretches the material out so palpably that you don’t need to be familiar with the original to hear it as music on the rack – dry, ironic cymbal clashes included. The disc is only 49 minutes and will fling comparatively few notes at you. But as so often with Abrahamsen, there is material here to last a lifetime.