Elena Firsova’s 18-minute, three-movement Piano Concerto – not to be confused with her Piano Concerto No 1 of 1985, which also goes by the title of Chamber Concerto No 3 – was composed in 2022 and premiered in Amsterdam in June that year by the performers on this first recording. Typically for her, the music is for the most part gently poetic on the surface and its elaboration meditative and rhapsodic. Yet everything rests on a core of careful, concise craftsmanship, in which each note earns its expressive and structural place. The preludial first two movements are balanced by a finale that is almost double their combined length. The full orchestral accompaniment, with triple wind and four percussionists, is used with discretion yet purpose.

Like Firsova’s Double Concerto for violin and cello of 2015, the Piano Concerto takes as its starting point the three-note motif of Beethoven’s ‘Muss es sein’, first heard in the solo piano’s misty opening bars. The reference is a token of what she has described as a meditation on Death, a topic that doubtless gained poignant extra resonance (though I have not found any statement to confirm the connection with the Concerto) when her composer-husband Dmitri Smirnov died in the first wave of covid. If that speculation is correct, it may also explain the insinuation of two waltzes from the finale of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony into the second and third movements. Elsewhere, it is possible to pick up affinities with Scriabin and Berg, but only by stepping outside the compelling flow of Firsova’s own invention.

Bronfman has been introducing the concerto in Philadelphia, New York, Berlin and elsewhere, and performances in 2024 are scheduled in Gothenburg and Liverpool. Such powerful advocacy is no more than the piece deserves. This may not be earth-shattering, demonstrative or glamorous music in the way one might normally expect from a contemporary concerto but it is consummately artistic and has important things to say.

As for this EP release, it comes with no information whatsoever on the work. Maybe an enterprising label will now pick it up and couple it with its above-mentioned twin, the Double Concerto, and its predecessor, the Chamber Concerto No 3.