This substantial demonstration of Leif Ove Andsnes’s commitment to contemporary composers is framed by two fine Bent Sørensen pieces which underline the programme’s governing concern with music that echoes, or shadows, other music. Lullabies is brief but its spirit of troubled nostalgia carries over into The Shadows of Silence itself. The title may be paradoxical – surely it is sound, not silence, that is being shadowed? – but the music is superbly crafted and powerfully expressive, ranging in mood between fluttering, melancholy reticence and tolling menace.

Sørensen’s music is refined even at its most aggressive, and as such it beautifully complements the eight miniatures from Kurtág’s Játékok (“Games”) which need only a few seconds to create complex worlds of starkly delineated yet imaginative allusion. But the meat of Andsnes’s double-decker sandwich is provided by two sizeable concertos, both of which acknowledge the apparent impossibility of escaping from the aura of romantic warhorses that, from Beethoven to Rachmaninov, still provide a staple diet for concert audiences (and record buyers).

The Lutosławski – written for Krystian Zimerman and recorded by him with the composer conducting soon after the premiere – is an intricate tapestry referencing virtuoso and poetic concerto traditions in an ironic yet never cynically exploitative fashion, and Andsnes manages to avoid po-faced downplaying of its parodic aspects while not exaggerating them either. After this, Marc-André Dalbavie’s concerto is a disappointment, taking far too long to turn time-honoured pianistic conventions into clichés. But Andsnes and Welser-Möst give it their all, and in well engineered sound this is a disc which, for the most part, can be cherished for being on the side of the angels, where contemporary repertoire is concerned.