Henri Dutilleux’s Cello Concerto Tout un monde lointain… (1970) is so intimately wrapped up in his relationship with Mstislav Rostropovich, the work’s dedicatee, that other cellists might struggle to find space to call their own. An example: Dutilleux grafted much of his cello-writing around the upper reaches of the A string, where Rostropovich could, in theory, have soared happily all day. Jean-Guihen Queyras’s 2001 recording with the Bordeaux-Aquitaine National Orchestra under Hans Graf tries to match Rostropovich’s expressive nobility but crumbles under the pressure. Recorded 10 years later, Anssi Karttunen (with Esa Pekka Salonen and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France) discreetly nudges Dutilleux’s piece away from Rostropovich, the motionless fourth movement in particular suggestive of post-spectralist harmonic distance.

Emmanuelle Bertrand’s new recording chisels something personal from her awareness of these varied thoughts about a Dutilleux performance tradition. Dutilleux was Bertrand’s mentor, yet her fierce independence shines through. In her hands that same fourth movement, ‘Miroirs’, has a warmer glow than Karttunen (and certainly than the maddeningly monochrome Truls Mørk), and she resists absolutely Queyras’s synthetic sweetness.

Dutilleux’s concerto was his response to the fleeting poetic images of Charles Baudelaire, and Bertrand’s playing remains infused with the idea of his ‘tout un monde lointain’ – a ‘whole distant world’. Mørk feels too often as if he is merely orbiting Myung-Whun Chung’s French Radio Orchestra; but Bertrand achieves a giddying sense of balanced perspective against those delicately spiced flavours served up by James Gaffigan’s Luzerner Sinfonieorchester. The highly misterioso percussive shuffling that opens the piece blends seamlessly into the cello’s low-key entry – the urgency of not much happening; the expressive potential of the unsaid.

And as the movement slips towards a slammed orchestral tutti oddly (consciously?) reminiscent of Messiaen, you realise how far this music has journeyed in such a short space of time. Bertrand’s decision to programme the Dutilleux alongside her rhythmically lithe and subtlety shaded performance of Debussy’s Cello Sonata (1915) is wise; the third movement of the concerto is a salty, fluid seascape clearly indebted to the French master. The disc opens with Dutilleux’s Trois Strophes sur le nom de Sacher (1976) – hardly the most exciting piece ever written, but Bertrand resists the arid dryness I’ve heard elsewhere.