Highly prolific composers from Mozart to Martinů have a capacity to pull flair and distinction out of the bag just as often as the same qualities elude them. Kalevi Aho is no exception. The works here find him in various states of mind but mostly diligence and distress.

The two pieces written to mourn fellow musicians are, in fact, the best. Lamento was created for the funeral of the violinist Sakari Laukola, who died young in 2001. It combines its sense of a eulogy with copious conflicting, searching emotions, fearlessly grappling with grief even in the moment. The tightly entwined Kuusisto brothers are not afraid of its raw emotions. Grief evidently draws Aho deep into his own creative sensibilities (especially when writing for his own instrument, the violin) and the memorial piece for the composer Pehr Henrik Nordgren is engaging in its combination of a salute with the search for a way out of the darkness; the use of a delimited scale based on the composer’s name means it occupies its own space with a strong sense of identity. It’s the best-played piece here, Jaakko Kuusisto’s sincerity obvious and his tone particularly strong and beautiful high up.

Elsewhere, Aho’s own identity can recede into the background, just as it does in some of his 31 concertos. It is less endearing than frustrating. The Solo Violin Sonata was written while the composer completed his national service in an alcohol clinic; we hear some desolation and pain in the piece, but also how Aho might have distracted himself with Bach and Bartók (Kuusisto, too, sounds a little caught between worlds). The Prelude, Toccata and Postlude is concise and equally well worked but anonymously post-Shostakovich. Sonja Fräki has already recorded an entire disc of Aho piano music and sails through the Piano Sonata No 2, which riffs on Beethoven’s Hammerklavier (and is surely even more tricky) but chases its own tail in its various retrospective objectives. This is music written straight from the hip and with force, but sometimes with Aho that’s not quite enough to draw you back for a second listen.