Fazıl Say describes his 2017 Cello Concerto as an artistic response to the terror attacks in Paris and Istanbul, and ‘an outcry for freedom and peace’. It was composed for Camille Thomas, who plays it with ferocious commitment on this premiere recording.

Say’s style is eclectic. The opening cello solo seems to pick up threads from the string-writing of Kodály and Bartók, and indeed much of the work is in a comfortable, quasi-tonal language that harks back nearly a century. I find his music most involving when he brings Turkish elements to the mix. Listen starting at 3'27" in the first movement, for example, where jaggedly syncopated rhythms dance beneath a supplicating folkloric melody. I find Say’s evocation of machine-gun fire at the centre of the second movement is too literal, dampening its emotional effect – a pity, as the lyrical outer sections have a delicately mournful beauty.

Thomas follows Say’s Concerto with Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, to which she brings an intense Elgarian nobility. All the other works are arrangements and transcriptions, mostly from vocal works. The disc opens with a version of the ‘Kaddisch’ from Ravel’s Deux Mélodies hébraïques that sounds at once ancient and modern, like something Jordi Savall might have dug up. Thomas’s long-breathed phrasing and generous use of portamento transform Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits into a romantic aria, and she brings touching intimacy to Dido’s Lament. But a certain sameness of mood and more than a hint of sentimentality set in at the programme’s midpoint (after the Bruch), and the last eight selections feel tailor-made to be ‘relaxing’ FM radio fare. I must add, too, that not all the arrangements are entirely successful. In ‘Una furtiva lagrima’, for instance, the cello doesn’t quite cut through the orchestra, the instrument lacking the ping of a tenor’s voice, and ‘Dalla sua pace’ not only seems to have been recorded in an entirely different acoustic but has the sound quality of a mono archival recording.

I have no caveats whatsoever concerning Thomas’s playing, which is unfailingly exquisite in its tonal sheen and imaginative detail, and sensitively accompanied throughout by the Brussels Philharmonic. Despite its generous timing, however, this programme seems more like a tray of similarly creamy hors d’oeuvres than a satisfying meal.