Aaron Jay Kernis is a big hitter on the American new music scene, a composer whose work was picked up by the New York Philharmonic when he was 23 and who has carefully cultivated his audience. In Meditation (in memoriam for John Lennon) (1981) the clubbable lyricism of his sustained cello writing hovers around the melodic outline of Lennon’s “Imagine” and is poised somewhere between solemnity and kitsch. For those who loathe Lennon’s phoney sloganeering the reference is a problem, and you’re left with the feeling that Kernis hasn’t properly thought through the consequences of building around such an iconic hook.

Superstar Etude #1 (1992) is another borrowing from popular culture. The finger-busting boogies and quicksilver glissandi of Jerry Lee Lewis are transformed into a flashy showpiece that touches on Henry Cowell-like clusters and requires yelled commentaries from the pianist. Like the Lennon piece, Kernis’s development of basic material is not without interest. He creates an intriguing sonic fusion between Jerry Lee’s bigger-than-life persona and the notey swank of the 19th-century virtuoso piano tradition. But when the pianist has to shout “Yo baby” again there’s a mismatch between the populist source and its composed manifestation.

Yes, there’s a pattern emerging. The solo piano Before Sleep and Dreams (1987-90) inhabits the world of children’s pieces by Schumann and Debussy while 100 Greatest Dance Hits (1993) is Kernis doing Americana, and both feel similarly boxed in by his desire to please. Black Box market him as “accessible” – how refreshing it would be to hear a composer say frankly that they don’t want to be understood.