Although written half a century apart, the Third Piano Concertos by Martinů and Rautavaara have enough in common, conceptually and musically, to make their coupling an instructive and rewarding one, as this release featuring Olli Mustonen demonstrates in no small measure.

Rautavaara’s work was commissioned by Vladimir Ashkenazy to be directed from the piano, and while Mustonen (a more than capable conductor) chooses not to do so, this performance is still persuasive for the way it elides between tranquillity and that ominous facet present in the first movement, or intense kinesis of an Adagio belying the perception of this composer’s latter-day music as lacking drama. Dalia Stasevska secures a tensile response from her Lahti forces in the final Energico, its close surely among the most evocative of any recent concerto.

Infrequently heard now, Martinů’s piece was a template for various American piano concertos following in its wake. Mustonen makes the most of its initial Allegro’s driving impetus, then brings a winsome poise to the Andante, whose later stages anticipate the flights of fancy in the music of this composer’s final decade. Its equivocal close sets up the equally hesitant start of the finale, the vigorous nature of its ensuing interplay between soloist and orchestra bringing about a bracingly affirmative conclusion such as Martinů (deliberately?) eschewed thereafter.

Neither concerto lacks for comparisons. Ashkenazy marginally underplays the rhetoric in his pioneering take on the Rautavaara, whereas Laura Mikkola’s incisiveness arguably undersells its more speculative aspect. In the Martinů, that by Rudolf Firkušný (made just a year before his death) retains an inherent authority whatever its tentative moments, while Giorgio Koukl’s incisiveness can feel a little impersonal at times. Superbly recorded, this newcomer is an ideal way into these pieces, and is maybe the start of a cycle similarly juxtaposing both composers?