Expect the unexpected from Patricia Kopatchinskaja: her latest release elides the (relatively) unfamiliar with the (relatively) familiar in a consideration of exile that is both wide-ranging and provocative.

Jonathan Keren’s transcription of music for Ukrainian/Russian panpipes makes an invigorating entrée into a programme that continues with Schnittke’s First Cello Sonata. Imaginatively arranged by Martin Merker with strings and harpsichord, it proves most effective in an ominous, even menacing central Presto but, thanks to Thomas Kaufmann, the closing Largo is not without the original’s intensely elegiac strain. A plaintive take on a Moldavian folk tune is no less apposite prior to Panufnik’s Violin Concerto, Kopatchinskaja relishing its initial Rubato’s contrast of the improvisatory and methodical; the Adagio emerges as one of his finest studies in the plangently confessional, which the Vivace counters through its rhythmic infectiousness.

The violinist’s stylish arrangement of a minuet and trio from the teenage Schubert leads into the other highlight. One of the Russian-born Parisian Wyschnegradsky’s most representative pieces, its quarter-tone writing is not laminated on to the harmonic texture but endemic to the musical content – brusque, threnodic then combative movements leading towards a decidedly forthright close. From here to the ruminative eloquence of Exil!, Ysaÿe’s brief though potent ‘symphonic poem’, is to encounter the governing concept of this album at its most affecting.

Surprising that the Schnittke has not previously been recorded in this incarnation, while there are fine alternatives for Panufnik by Piotr Plawner, Wyschnegradsky by the Asasello Quartet and Ysaÿe by Jean-Jacques Kantorow. Any Kopatchinskaja project needs to be judged on its own terms, from which vantage ‘Exile’, recorded with unsparing immediacy and pertinently annotated, is a further essential acquisition from this most questing of present-day musicians.