Anders Hillborg’s Violin Concerto No 2 is a real head-scratcher, but after eight or nine listens I’m just about ready with some preliminary thoughts. Over a few days I have oscillated between detesting and adoring the piece. I admit to still struggling with it – odd, given it’s largely traditional, absolutely lucid and in no sense a tricky listen.

Hillborg is beguiling when spinning the slow, long-lined music that could only be his, but even when that music genuinely impresses, it can still sail treacherously close to the winds of conceitedness and schmaltz even while retaining its originality. Much of the concerto brings to mind the ‘silver chain of sound’, modal spaciousness and spread string tuttis of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. It’s unusual to come across 21st-century Nordic music whose view of nature is a pastoral one. But this, like so much Hillborg, is a dark pastoral, animated by the composer’s way with orchestration and his strong ear for harmony – simple in macro terms, sophisticated in micro ones.

Much of the concerto’s faster music drops you out of those highly affecting musical weather systems into something altogether more banal and flat-packed. The soloist’s noodling at the bottom of the register starts to grate. This is not, it turns out, the fertile ground between figuration and material that it proves in concertos by Sibelius and even by this disc’s conductor, Salonen – more a sort of fixed reel that proves unable to snap or develop into anything that might reframe the meaning of its own original incarnation (the whole point, in music like this).

A parallel example comes in the concerto’s highly affecting motto: an upward cadence on the octave that evocatively cracks open a new vista – very Hillborg, and how many living composers could equal it, as a gesture? But when we hear it one final time, it hasn’t changed much beyond taking on a sickly quality. And it has to be said, the concerto’s ending is hackneyed. The joy of recorded music is the implication that some day, another team of musicians might come along and prove all those judgements way off.

Liquid Marble is stock Hillborg and has been recorded before by this exact personnel (Ondine, 11/03). From memory, there’s not much beyond a touch more character in the winds – both the screeching avian calls and the Nintendo-style robotics – to separate Salonen’s second recording from his first. Once more, I admire Hillborg’s composerly ability to hear the big things: those elements of planetary physics that seem ever-present in his works and to which he so assiduously attunes the forces of a symphony orchestra given his own personal tint (plenty don’t manage that). Reacquainted with the work older and wiser, I find myself occasionally frustrated by the ineptitude of some base material and am left with a residual feeling that gesture (those parallel glissandos) is over emphasised at the expense of form and/or solidity.

Eldbjørg Hemsing is a good fit for the concerto: a musician with a sense of the modern literary mysticism that is at the heart of Hillborg’s work, who can flit from darkness to light without sounding like a button-pusher, and can manage all the tough corners. She is just as poetic in Kväll, Hillborg’s faultless elaboration of a Swedish folk song for violin and voice (it was written for the pop singer Eva Dahlgren but gets a soulful performance here from Hannah Holgersson that has the necessary directness, albeit highly produced). As if to add to the conundrum, the booklet has plenty about the history of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra but next to nothing of use on the music. Over to you.