Here are two substantial works by the Bloomington-based composer Claude Baker (b1948), whose Piano Concerto (2010), written to celebrate the centenary of Indiana University, is also a tribute to Walt Whitman. Titles from the latter’s poems preface each movement, though only the first, ‘Drum Taps’, and the cadenza-like fourth, ‘Dalliance’, eschew allusions to other composers. The second, ‘Silent Sun’, quotes from Ives’s Concord Sonata while the third, ‘Lilacs’, takes in both Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde; the finale, ‘Ecstatic Ghost’, draws on Messiaen and Ives inter alios in an aura of mystical rapprochement. Less certain is the integration between these and Baker’s own music, akin to Ruggles in its often dissonant yet never atonal harmony, such that a personal identity never quite materialises.

This is less an issue in Aus Schwanengesang, which takes the Heine settings from Schubert’s posthumous cycle then rearranges their order according to the poet’s ‘Die Heimkehr’. These are not orchestrations but paraphrases of the original songs – moving from the tense expectation of ‘Das Fischermädchen’, via the ominous rapture and fraught emotion of the composite ‘Am Meer’ and ‘Die Stadt’, climaxing with the horror of ‘Der Doppelgänger’ which carries over into the yearning of ‘Ihr Bild’, before ending in the fatalism of ‘Der Atlas’. Effective as a concept, its falling between transcription and re-composition again places Baker’s voice at the periphery.

Performances could hardly be bettered. Marc-André Hamelin conjures scintillating pianism, while Gilbert Varga and Juanjo Mena secure committed orchestral playing. Another work might have brought Baker’s idiom into greater focus: there was certainly room on this disc.