Pascal Dusapin is among the most-recorded of present-day European composers and this new disc makes available three concertante works drawn from across two decades of his career. Earliest is Aria (1991) which, as the title suggests, finds the soloist unfolding an animated and often capricious melodic line against a harmonically dense contribution from the orchestra. Highly consistent on its own terms, yet the latter pieces are appreciably more inventive in terms of a continuing dialogue. Inspired by Beckett and dedicated to the memory of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Quad (1996) engages as an active and increasingly fractious repartee that culminates in a supplicatory cadenza, then a coda of the un-easiest calm, while Jetzt genau! (‘Now exactly!’; 2011) is a concertino whose often agitated dialogue is interrupted by a lengthy cadenza which reminds one that Dusapin is as resourceful in his writing for the piano as any of his contemporaries.

This latter aspect is amply conveyed by Nicolas Hodges’s scintillating rendition, with Victor Pereira and Angel Gimeno hardly less attuned to the demands of their respective works. Framing the concertos are the first and (to date) last of Dusapin’s ‘solos’ – the simmering and ominous Go (1992) and the charged and climactic Uncut (2009) – which in themselves are fine demonstrations of the composer’s orchestral mastery. They make an arguably even greater impact as heard in the context of the sequence overall, for which Pascal Rophé’s recording is required listening, though Baldur Brönnimann’s accounts are highly convincing and bookend a disc which is as good an introduction to the composer as any available. The sound has both detail and impact, though it is a pity that the extensive booklet-notes are given in Portuguese only: a reminder that Dusapin is singularly under-represented in discussion of contemporary music in English.