Nico Muhly and Philip Glass go back a long way. There’s a scene in Scott Hicks’s 2007 documentary on Philip Glass, A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, where Nico Muhly – then working as the composer’s assistant – explains how he managed to dissuade Glass from making a major U-turn in reorchestrating one of his film scores. ‘I seem to have talked him out of it’, remarks a relieved Muhly, ‘so that’s a victory for the day …’

Muhly has progressed a long way since those days in Glass’s editing suite, as heard in his brilliant new violin concerto, Shrink. Composed in 2019 and performed here with characteristic grit and flair by its dedicatee Pekka Kuusisto and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, the work’s title ostensibly refers to a process of intervallic contraction (or ‘shrinkage’) running through its three movements – from the wide-open leaps of the first to the much smaller spaces between the notes heard in the last.

If this all sounds a bit dry and technical, the musical results are anything but. In an altogether different play on the work’s title (shrink = psychiatrist), Muhly effectively anthropomorphises the intervals, imbuing each one with its own psychological ‘character’. In the first movement (‘Ninths’), Kuusisto’s animated violin leaps around agitatedly against pit-pattering pizzicatos in the string orchestra. Deep notes boom out of low double basses every now and then. Slow-motion lines are stretched out in a beautifully sculpted second movement (‘Sixths’), while the nervous, claustrophobic third evokes the final movement from John Adams’s Violin Concerto in its obsessive focus on a moto perpetuo idea.

If a veneer of complexity covers Muhly’s concerto to expose simpler layers lying underneath, the surface simplicity of Glass’s String Quartet No 3 reveals hidden depths. Based on material originally composed for Paul Schrader’s film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Glass instils variety into his trademark two- and three-note oscillating patterns by placing them in uneven blocks of repeating bar-lengths (2, 5, 8 and 9) in the first movement, and irregular time-signatures (8/8, 9/8 and 10/8) in the third. Taut and muscular during the fourth movement and unified in the fifth, Kuusisto’s string-orchestra arrangement nevertheless captures the prevailing sense of unease that permeates the soundtrack’s sound world. One suspects that in this case Muhly would have given the reorchestration his thumbs up. An arrangement of ‘The Orchard’ from music by Glass and Foday Musa Suso originally written for Jean Genet’s play The Screens adds to the prevailing sense of tense uneasiness captured on this recording.