Few current pianists place such emphasis on their contemporaries as Alexandre Tharaud. This new release comprises three concertos that highlight current European compositional concerns.

Balinese gamelan may be present from the start, but Cara Bali is an apposite title for Thierry Pécou’s concerto (his third for Tharaud), as indebted to latter-day minimalism or Ligeti as to gong kebyar. Both movements are marked Vivace – the first pursuing an intricate concertante discourse and gradually gaining momentum, which its successor intensifies via a series of episodes that, characterised by contrasts in timbre and intonation, build towards a visceral conclusion.

With its connotations of a desert-sea poised between visible and invisible sides of the moon, Mare Marginis finds Ramon Lazkano essaying music that abounds in glacial textures and ethereal images. Its single movement is always eventful, not least through the ways in which the piano anticipates or responds to the orchestra, though whether there is a connective pathway through the varied landscape towards liberation being attained must be for each listener to judge.

By contrast, Alex Nante’s Luz de lejos unfolds a symmetrical sequence of audible clarity and definition. Proceeding as vividly contrasted or intensifying dualities, its six movements focus on the central dialogues between piano and horn then harp – this latter a ‘love song’ the more affecting for its restraint. The eponymous finale does not so much attempt a summation as channel the musical tension to a close that renders what went before via a poetic if ambivalent perspective.

Tharaud’s contribution cannot be faulted in terms of its finesse or insight, with the playing of the various French and German orchestras comparable in commitment. Whether or not these concertos enter the repertoire, making their acquaintance proves never less than worthwhile.