In Seven Days is the serious piano-and-orchestra work to Adès’s more display-orientated Piano Concerto (DG, 5/20), in which sense it reflects well on both the composer and his favoured pianist to follow their Boston recording of the latter with this Tanglewood account of the former. It is, I would argue, Adès’s masterpiece: the fullest expression to date of his schematic musical mind – its ability to transform, contemplate, expand and recontextualise a fertile idea before unwinding all that and taking you back to the start like a magician pulling the original card from the deck. The unflinching focus on the material draws Adès away from his gauche habit of musical name-dropping while freeing up space for mesmerising orchestration. The music’s concurrent ability to evoke the seven chapters of creation – to ‘expand and explode as if the genetic code of the universe were bursting out in music both organic and geometric’ (Tom Service in the booklet) – is the layer that makes this the work of a genius.

Like The Rite of Spring, In Seven Days seems to have abandoned the non-musical material with which it was created. At the time of the first recording, that material – Tal Rosner’s film – was part of the title. Not much separates the recordings, both conducted by Adès (though you get Rosner’s moving images on the Signum release) other than Nicolas Hodges’s more boxy-sounding piano and the London Sinfonietta’s surer idea of itself as an ensemble. The Myrios recording can sound muddy but it also reveals more texture in certain sections (notably string and brass). The ‘Hollywood’ moment in the first fugue – ‘Creatures of the Sea and Sky’ – is a little less garish and a bit more heartening on the newcomer, which is more or less the case across the board even if some might say the focus of the original recording suits the architecture better. Here Adès seems to recognise and relish the sense of strain he builds into the piece’s development. In this piece, unlike the Concerto, he never takes the easy path.

The best among the piano-only works is the set of three Mazurkas, whose pre-ordained frameworks again prompt Adès to greater levels of invention. Like the wrenching half-passacaglia that is the Berceuse, the third of the Mazurkas slides hopelessly downwards; its distillation and white space play with the Chopin model but prove, as the concertante work does, how Adès’s ability to place (or remove) a single note lines him up with Bach, Britten, Boulez, etc. The dirty cut glass and trolled waltzes of the Powder Her Face paraphrase are a typical Adès in-joke; I can take them or leave them (or better still, stick to the opera) but there’s plenty more to get your teeth into here.