You can rely on Anne Akiko Meyers to deliver something more than a violin concerto with fill-ups, as this latest concept album proves. Eight works, six composers, among whom the odd one out in every respect is Maurice Ravel: the only figure who hasn’t been directly involved in Meyers’s career. Right in the middle of a zenned-out album, sitting between Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel and a lullaby by John Corigliano, Ravel’s gypsy romp Tzigane constitutes an almighty bump in the road.

Meyers has recorded the piece before but here we have a version featuring Jakub Ciupiński’s digital re-creation of the luthéal, the piano add-on Ravel indicated might be used. That sounds convincing and fascinating, but Meyers’s own gypsy fire doesn’t have the abandon of some of her recent rivals, Patricia Kopatchinskaja included (Alpha, 2/18).

I would have ditched Tzigane altogether, because Meyers’s stern, highly controlled but variously coloured sound meets every other piece here very well indeed. Her rapid arpeggio figurations across the four strings of the 1741 ex-Vieuxtemps Guarneri del Gesù are firm and consistent, her tone strong without being sweet or glossy. It works a treat in Glass’s Metamorphosis II (the arrangement is by Michael Riesman) and for the ritornellos in Pärt’s Fratres. Meyers adopts a fixed colour for each phase of the latter, each holding you in its gaze. From the figurations at 6'00" she strikes every note bang in its centre point. Each bow stroke has the same, consistent level of intensity.

That said, Corigliano’s Lullaby, written for Meyer’s baby daughter, might have benefited from less contact and a more innocent sound. It’s a pretty piece but the two original scores by Ciupiński are more worthy successors to Pärt’s, each disciplined and fertile. Initially, Lauridsen’s own concertante arrangement of O magnum mysterium reveals how much the piece owes to the open-prairie sound of Copland and others, but the cymbal-strewn anti-crescendos are straight out of the Hollywood cheesemonger’s toolkit and the piece becomes something more sickly than a ‘quiet song of profound inner joy’ (the composer’s description of the original motet). Maybe that’s OK given the market. And, frankly, I struggle more with the shock of Tzigane.