No one could accuse Gidon Kremer of taking the easy option when it comes to programming, and so it proves on this disc with Kremerata Baltica. With a varied career in rock as well as classical music, Stevan Tickmayer’s Eight Hymns (1986) might not be wholly typical and yet this brief sequence – violin emerging out of a string orchestra timbrally enriched by vibraphone and piano – seems a fitting tribute to Andrei Tarkovsky, its somnolent mood darkening notably at the close. Cello and bass guitar replace piano in Giya Kancheli’s Silent Prayer (2007). Marking the 80th birthday of Rostropovich and the 60th of Kremer, this is no double concerto – pursuing a muted desolation into which the taped voice of a child is the equivalent of a paler shade of white.

How these pieces interact with Franck’s Piano Quintet (1879) is for listeners to decide, but the evoking of Paul Klee’s theory of harmony seems decidedly “after the event”. Yet this performance of the work which redefined its composer’s thinking is a persuasive one – Kremer et al underlining such aspects as the first movement’s development being an intensification of its introduction, or the way that the slow movement’s close segues into the prefatory bars of the finale; the work coming thematically full-circle to endow the familiar “tragedy to triumph” trajectory with fateful inevitability. The comparisons may evince greater drama and greater poise but this new account, lucidly recorded, is one to reckon with – heard in context or in isolation.