A kind of study for his 2013 guitar concerto Transit, Kromos is Sebastian Fagerlund’s way of exploring his own and the guitar’s capabilities. In that sense, it is both essay and étude, repeated motifs testing the borders beyond the thickets of strums, slaps and scales.

It’s also a wonderful way for the versatile Finnish guitarist Ismo Eskelinen to open this recital of 21st-century guitar music. Which, taken as a whole, one could hear as an essay in how readily the guitar assimilates disparate styles while honouring their differences. This is partly in the nature of the guitar’s construction. Strummed chords, fast arpeggios and tremolo are easier than sustained melodies and polyphonic textures. Yet heart and head are here in abundance, the toccata their implicit shared sign.

Eskelinen captures well Aho’s respectful orientalism and intense feeling for space and mode, while proving Mustonen’s dramatic Second Sonata for solo guitar is, despite the composer’s words to the contrary, no more ‘abstract’ than the earlier work, which ‘drew inspiration from the world of Finnish myths’. Under Eskelinen’s fingers, Tan Dun’s Seven Desires becomes an erotic dance between flamenco guitar and pipa, perhaps even between yang and yin, the shared base language of tremolo and mode set alight with bent pitches, percussive gestures, trills and rapid scales. How apt that the pointillistic flurries and textures of Tiensuu’s following Daydreams for guitar and electronics should find the guitar dancing with its self-replicating doppelgänger. And after all the passion is spent, peace drops slow in Eskelinen’s beautiful arrangement of Alakotila’s Psalm.