There’s some entertaining, dazzling, smile-inducing, toe-tapping music here but I can’t give you a cast-iron promise that there’s much more. Aaron Jay Kernis is the pre eminent orchestral showman of the age and his meeting of minds with Heifetz’s representative on earth James Ehnes has resulted in a concerto that goes through just about every motion possible.

Kernis doesn’t just get multiple shades of feeling from the chord sequence of his opening Chaconne; he gets that sequence to semaphore drastically different emotions while the music itself becomes stylistically more manic, roaring out that chord sequence with ominous foreboding one minute and merrily tweeting it the next. There are interesting disruptive elements in the slow movement, where Ehnes trades his fire-breathing for a pure ribbon of sound, and a dazzling finale that underlines the piece’s credentials as a concerto as much for orchestra as for violin.

James Newton Howard’s Concerto is more straightforwardly built, which initially refreshes but soon frustrates, as every passage feels cued up like a film score, in direct contrast to Kernis’s twisting kaleidoscope – reactive in the moment rather than long-term. The white notes, clean intervals and fresh air of the Andante middle movement initially endear themselves but the feeling is of Copland without the undertow; the Presto gets lovingly and refreshingly close to the cleanness of expression that lies behind much American music but it can’t help fattening up and trying to lock into bigger narratives that aren’t there. The big-boned coda feels somehow hollow.

There are no such aspirations in Bramwell Tovey’s Stream of Limelight, a flight of imaginative fancy inspired apparently by Ehnes’s playing and again concerned with notions of display – a clever enough pastiche piece but of more personal than wider musical value. Ehnes’s characteristic sweetness and tenderness married to unerring strength and direct musicianship are on display in all three pieces. The one I’d be most keen to hear again is Kernis’s. How many times is another question.