Grażyna Bacewicz: all those harsh consonants, suggestive of jagged edges and perhaps a certain defiant wilfulness – qualities shared by her music. The connection is fanciful, but no more so than the one the composer herself drew between having been a premature baby and the ‘engine’ of her mature personality (one of a number of fascinating insights from Anastasia Belina’s first-rate booklet notes).

Bacewicz’s music certainly thrives on its high metabolic rate, its impatience, even, for which this brilliantly executed new album makes no apology. The relatively early Overture, composed in Nazi-occupied Poland, already highlights this temperamental default, and not only because Nicholas Collon and his orchestra take it at such a cracking pace. The Piano Concerto of 1949 elevates convulsive contrast almost to a principle, with big neo-Romantic gestures (shades of the Rachmaninov of the Paganini Rhapsody) cheek-by-jowl with luminous Martin≤-like sequences, Polish folk-song paraphrases (semi-compulsory under the post-war Stalinist socialist realist aegis), and a percussive drive that suggests, to me, above all Honegger. Switch on to this restless mindset and it’s not hard to relish Peter Jablonski’s dashing account; resist it, however, and the suspicion of short-windedness persists.

Seventeen years on, the Concerto for two pianos is a shade or two more atonal: more forbidding in the slow movement, more abrasive in the finale, as though consciously taking into account something of the moderated avant-gardism of Bacewicz’s Polish contemporaries (which would be hardly surprising, given that she was co-founder of the Warsaw Autumn Festival). Bartók is the evident jumping-off point, as he is even more overtly in the Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion. Here at least, though, the music seems a little more concerned with continuity. A couple of Sibelian evocations suggest the depths Bacewicz might have been able to plumb had she been able to curb her instincts for nervily hopping from one idea to the next.

At the very least this music deserves recognition for its effortless disregard of the neoclassical/modernist/humanist divide. Jablonski is a seasoned Bacewicz crusader, with a fine solo album of her music to his name (3/22). Elisabeth Brauss, Nicholas Collon and the Finnish RSO match him for energy and aplomb. Altogether this is a disc as thought-provoking as it is engaging.