This is the first recording of New York-based Chinese composer Tan Dun’s Pipa Concerto, and it’s an absolute knockout. With strong, vigorous direction from Yuri Bashmet and some wonderfully extrovert playing from both the Moscow Strings and well known pipa exponent Wu Man, Tan’s overt theatricality bursts forth like a rampant Chinese dragon.

Following a four-movement format reminiscent of the earlier style of Baroque concerto, this is a work bristling with forceful rhythms, tightly entwined cross-cultural textures and techniques and even yelling, slapping and foot stamping. The third-movement Adagio provides the only real respite from this bustling activity, drawing on a prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier to create a serene neo-Baroque atmosphere.

If the Pipa Concerto is based on Tan’s earlier Ghost Opera for pipa and string quartet, Toru Takemitsu’s Nostalghia for solo violin and strings takes as its starting-point Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film. This beautiful, elegiac tribute to the great Russian director is typical Takemitsu; not so the blues and waltz elements in the following excerpts from three of the latter’s actual film scores. The mood of the second extract, from the score for Black Rain – a film dealing with Hiroshima – does however have much in common with Nostalghia while pointing forwards to Hikaru Hayashi’s equally moving viola concerto, Elegia.

Bashmet is the soloist in both Nostalghia and Elegia, and it would be difficult to find a better advocate for these works, such is his ability to wring every ounce of emotion from the notes while retaining a certain poised objectivity. What a balancing act.