Concerto form has provided Bent Sørensen with staging posts along his career beginning with his breakthrough violin concerto Sterbende Gärten in 1993 and culminating, thus far, in the Grawemeyer Award-winning triple concerto L’isola della città. None, arguably, concedes to the echt traditions of the form but the composer has always had a particular and evocative way with the ‘them and us’ predicament it suggests; in each of the concertos here orchestra members lay their assigned instruments down to hum in harmony or play unison percussion (a Sørensen hallmark). Nor are the spatial opportunities afforded by the existence of one player against many ever wasted by this composer.

The works are arranged in chronological order and you feel Sørensen getting more fluent with those concepts as he gets older; by the time of the Trumpet Concerto written for Tine Thing Helseth in 2012-13 Sørensen has a more interesting relationship with the white space of silence and his distinctively fractured tonality feels at its most nocturnal and resonant.

Each piece, in fact, is more about resonance than virtuosity: the trumpet’s journey to un-muzzled freedom (it only really finds its full voice once the concerto has effectively finished), the clarinet’s search for its own avian flock (found, eventually, in the form of 11 other clarinets positioned spatially around the concert hall in the last moments) and the piano’s desire to sing out the Bach chorale Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ that it mumbles at the very start but only has the confidence to play out, for eight seconds, just as the curtain falls. As always with Sørensen, the feeling is of a floating dreamscape populated by ripples, throbbing waves, half-remembered tunes and fleeting glimpses of past happiness – contexts for each of those journeys to freedom/home.

In each case the soloist is the light source and the orchestra the echoing space, which makes these concertos tough to get inside for the accompanying orchestras, with the DNSO a little more obviously adept than the NCO. The latter is used for the two concertos, piano and trumpet, conceived on a Classical orchestral scale. From each of the big-name soloists, the dramaturgy is subtle but as clear as day. Probably not a contender for ‘the one Bent Sørensen disc you must own’, but a must for fans.