Aleksi Barrière’s booklet introduction refers to the concerto as ‘a musical dramatisation of the encounter of an individual soloist with the sound world of a composer’. Despite 20 years of collaboration with Per Nørgård, Jakob Kullberg’s engagement with the composer’s music appears never to have lost its spark. Indeed, the two concertos here pre-date the partnership and one started out as a different piece altogether.

I hear the first movement of Nørgård’s 1985 Cello Concerto No 1 as a journey, on the behalf of the cello, from loneliness to attempted integration and back again, with a frustrated little dance from the soloist at its apex. A deep sense of harmonic melancholy follows in the second movement as the cello stalks the orchestra from behind. The third movement is a virtuoso, calligraphic drama that almost settles into the sort of systemic groove you’d expect from the composer (but which he appears to avoid here).

Nørgård is surely in transition in that piece. But he is more recognisably himself in the Viola Concerto of the following year. There are whiffs of Berg’s Violin Concerto here in the dedication to a dead child (the nuclear disarmament campaigner Samantha Smith) and the reminiscence of a Bach chorale. It’s a more centred, grounded score in which tensions simmer over long periods. Nothing sounds too hard for Kullberg, who easily draws the concerto on to his lower-sounding instrument and whose tone is consistently clean and considered. He sings a little in his own bespoke cadenza. The piece winds up almost laconic.

As Jørgen Jensen notes in the booklet, the heterophonic effect that launches the concerto appears as a fireball after Saariaho’s Notes on Light (2006), her culminating instrumental journey from obscuring gloom to a brightness no less uneasy. The respective composers’ sound worlds are different but not unrelated, making for a satisfying album that defies the sort of petty analysis I have attempted above.

Again, Kullberg plays his own cadenza as part of Saariaho’s meaty central movement, ‘Awakening’. Overall, his is a chillier, more confrontational performance than Anssi Karttunen’s with the Orchestre de Paris and Christoph Eschenbach. John Storgårds and his BBC Philharmonic create the perfect atmospheric orchestral hinterland as context. Distinguished music on a cohesive album, charismatically delivered.