Readers may disagree, but I can’t supress the vague feeling on listening to this disc that Kaija Saariaho might just be the new Philip Glass – a composer who is having the last laugh as she repeats herself over and over, milking her aesthetic stasis for all its worth. I scribbled in my notes the frequency with which I heard the cello – thoughtfully played by Anssi Karttunen – play a sustained note before tensing up into a tremolo and then collapsing into a distorted downward growl. And that’s nothing compared to Saariaho’s writing for flutes, which is based on a toolkit of gauche gestures that become clichéd fast.

Way back in Laconisme de l’aile (1982) Saariaho was getting her flute to do the ‘decay’ thing: sending it swooping up to a note from which it drifts downward, losing altitude and power, towards an unspecified point. You hear it in Couleurs du vent (1998) and again in the three movements of Sombre (2012). When the latter piece introduces a text, nicely sung by Daniel Belcher, at last Saariaho has to react to something constricting; conceptual tramlines which immediately force her to do other things.

Mirrors (1997) presents a rigorous instrumental mirror-game between flute and cello that would be so refreshing were it not heard among so much other music that exposes those instrumental tics and habits. Likewise, Saariaho’s vision of wind in Oi Kuu (1990) is evocative, individual and blessed with a clear cumulative sense: a journey rather than a snapshot blown up too big.

Camilla Hoitenga’s playing is often astonishing, not least in the way she melds her human voice with her instrument’s. She frequently speaks text through her flute, too. But that’s another repeating gesture from Saariaho that has traversed the decades. It might have seemed new and fertile when separated by years of work in other media. But, concertinaed together on one disc, it becomes one more irritant that keeps on irritating.