Distant Light is surely the most-recorded violin concerto by a living composer, with almost enough versions listed on the streaming site Idagio to warrant a Gramophone Collection. It remains among the most representative of the Latvian composer’s works, with its incantation-like melody built of a distinctly pained, Baltic shape; its clear abstract narrative in which light and love prove victorious over darkness and hate; and its exploration of sonority which sees the music recede to the very edge of audibility while retaining its piercing strength.

Gluzman, who plays Leopold Auer’s erstwhile instrument and has made such wonderfully Slavic-sounding recordings of the Glazunov and Tchaikovsky concertos, brings more fervour, more overt fortitude and a touch more vibrato to the solo line than Renaud Capuçon. But Gluzman is no stranger to Baltic music and the experience pays; his lack of fear does wonders for the work’s pain (he never prettifies), but to my ears he isn’t quite so effective at the moments of transcendent lightness, which don’t float like Capuçon’s (the plateau at the end of the piece is so hard to pull off on a recording), though the Israeli’s impassioned approach to the strain and stress of the cadenzas is effective. Lintu’s swarming orchestra at the end of Cadenza II is typically on-message.

In Summer Dances, the beauty and joy of the Latvian summer is filtered through the sensibility of a composer who tends to laugh even when describing great tribulations and whose music always sees ugliness and beauty as two sides of the same coin. Gluzman and Sandis teinbergs are excellently matched; they play the bookend movement ‘Broadly, sonorously’ as if back to back and the inner movements as if face to face. There is zero showmanship.

Vasks’s 2001 Piano Quartet grapples with the composer’s familiar demons of oppression and a world gone mad, ignorant of nature. The journey isn’t as clear as this composer normally plots it. Resolution doesn’t stick despite being bestowed upon the discourse three times (the unease is unusually marked even for Vasks). It has finger-twisting cadenzas and a beautiful, consoling and long-breathed melody for the first violin, and is thus an excellent companion piece for the concerto on disc. The fugue that takes root during the passacaglia – which is itself sucked into a vortex of striking darkness and power – is one of the most technically interesting things Vasks has done. But the journey is more convoluted than we’ve come to expect from this plain-speaking, clear-headed composer. I guess that’s life.