Doth Mahan Esfahani protest too much? Here we have a cohesive, effective, taut programme of 20th-century harpsichord works that builds surely in density, complexity and philosophical provocation as it proceeds. In terms of programming, it’s a winner. Yet Esfahani writes not one but two barbed introductions in the booklet, one of which insists, on a noticeably staccato tone, that he must be allowed to simply play the music he wants to play at a given time. Well yes. The album’s title also wants to provoke an argument that isn’t really called for, thanks to Esfahani’s musicianship.

The album could just as easily have been titled after Anahita Abbasi’s Intertwined Distances, as John Fallas’s booklet note illustrates with rigour. It starts out with the clear shapes, mirror games and spacious probing of acoustic resonance in Takemitsu’s Rain Dreaming, in which Esfahani plays the echoes as musically as he does the keys. Cowell’s Set of Four is framed by a series of pained neo-Baroque flourishes, Louis XIV-style opulence refracted through the mind of a man who had spent four years of the 1930s in San Quentin prison. It’s like a nightmarish Gloriana and Esfahani mines thrilling darkness in his Jukka Ollikka harpsichord.

Kaija Saariaho’s Jardin secret II is witty and intelligent, and presents an expression of ‘intertwined distances’ far more eloquent than Abbasi’s – a teasing, meticulous game between amplified harpsichord and electronics that avoids the rhetorical or the gestural and forms a good prelude to Gavin Bryars’s theatrical After Handel’s ‘Vesper’. The piece, by its fantastical, narrative nature, is less focused than its counterparts but at least exposes the many registrations on Esfahani’s instrument and his ability to tinker with it like a loving mechanic. Voicing counts for little in Abbasi’s work, which uses electronics to throw everything but the kitchen sink into a dense, dark sound picture and seems less an evocation of intertwined distance after what we’ve already heard. Luc Ferrari’s Musique socialiste? gives its own question-concept space to breathe, pitting the steady electronic throbbing of the state against the paranoia of the individual harpsichordist – soothing or suffocating, depending on your politics. There’s a lot here to get your teeth into but, in truth, not much to be afraid of.