Unsuk Chin follows John Adams in getting the full Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings treatment while still alive, and rest assured the honour is deserved. All six works included here underline what a diligent, imaginative and consistently engaging composer Chin is. Hers is music that deserves the parallel qualities brought to it by this illustrious orchestra – and, for that matter, by the beautiful physical product that has been assembled to house the capturing of them.

Structure and sensuality are bound tight in Chin’s scores. Her tendency to let you in on a piece’s DNA from the start is evident in the first of her violin concertos, where clarity and logic are put in service of cumulative emotional pull (no accident that it begins, like Berg’s Concerto, with arpeggaic patterning on open strings). Far more interesting than the classical floorplan is what Chin does within her material: how she refracts her themes outwards – the music becoming more fantastical even as it cleaves resolutely to its established geometry. Here as elsewhere in her work, an enchanted forest of orchestration – lusciously irrigated in this instance by the Berlin Philharmonic’s collective sound – is married to a mathematical discipline not just of overall form but of the treatment and expansion of those thematic germs. Clarity is a given, but Chin’s lyrical and contrapuntal flair truly blossom in the final movement, the only one of the four not rooted in the instrument’s open strings.

Chin’s concertos for cello and piano have been recorded before by these same soloists and the Seoul Symphony Orchestra (DG, 11/14), the results of which were nominated for a Gramophone Award (the Cello Concerto also has the same conductor, Myung-Whun Chung). There’s not much between the two recordings beyond companions and presentation but the sound picture on the Berlin newcomer is less literal, which suits the Piano Concerto’s echoes of Ligeti. Here is more of Chin’s endearing search for stability in world of fantasy, heard as various impulses come to bear on the interlocking rhythmic patterns woven by the first movement. Messiaen looms behind the second movement’s lacing of laconic harmonic relish with bursts of ecstasy. The whole piece needs maximum precision and receives it here from orchestra and soloist who have, nonetheless, prioritised far more than getting the notes right.

That concerto was written for Sunwook Kim, just as the Cello Concerto was for Alban Gerhardt, who can sustain the long legato lines and lyrical turns that emerge as the work moves away from cat-and-mouse games (including a delicious Tom & Jerry upward pitch bend). If Chin reveals her serious sense of humour and ability to tailor to a particular musician in that piece, she goes even further on both fronts in Le silence des Sirènes, a vocal scena written for Barbara Hannigan – more specifically, for her elasticated, stratospheric and chameleonic voice as much as for her characteristic cabaret-meets-monodrama delivery (Chin does well to keep her detailed orchestra largely out of Hannigan’s way while maintaining the vocal line’s seductive charisma). This is a thrilling, totally theatrical performance of a little roller coaster of a piece that cocks an affectionate snook at Homer and co. It’s hard to imagine the score’s choreographed cackling, speaking and suppressed nightmare screams being realised by anyone else. You’ll want the Blu ray just to see Hannigan physically negotiate it, gravity-defying hair included.

Rattle also conducts Chorós Chordón, a work that again reinforces Chin’s determination to drill deep and then even deeper into her ideas, while Daniel Harding takes on Rocaná, in which the composer moves close to the vaporous sound world of the Icelandic school (it was inspired by two Olafur Eliasson installations) with spectral progressions that take in striking glacial string textures. Everything but the violin concerto is filmed for the Blu ray (or the Digital Concert Hall, if you prefer), which also includes an in-depth interview with Chin and a tantalising glimpse of her Berlin apartment. Go on – treat yourself.