“I paint the same music over and over again,” Hans Abrahamsen has said, and no works in his relatively slender output demonstrate that more clearly than the three on this disc. Other composers – Wolfgang Rihm, Harrison Birtwistle – regularly talk of all their music being carved from the same block of material, with each work illuminating different facets of that creative monolith. But Abrahamsen makes the process much clearer, revisiting existing works to expand or transcribe them, and to place their ideas in entirely new musical contexts.

So both the orchestral works here – the Four Pieces, from 2004, and the Piano Concerto, completed four years earlier – derive from the set of 10 solo piano Studies that Abrahamsen first composed in 1983, when he was still very much identified with the Neue Einfachheit (New Simplicity) movement in Danish music, though even then there was never anything at all simple about what he was writing. As Tamara Stefanovich’s dazzlingly clear performance shows, the Studies, with their sideways references to two centuries of keyboard writing, are clearly indebted to the Studies by Ligeti, with whom Abrahamsen had worked for a while. In the late 1990s he returned to the pieces as a way of ridding himself of a massive creative block that had prevented him from composing anything for 10 years.

Those reworkings did the trick, and led in turn to the concerto, three of whose four movements are based on studies. But in fact, ideas from the set are woven almost continuously through the textures of the whole work, with its echoes of a lost romanticism alongside passages of immense rhythmic complexity and sometimes jarring changes of direction and mood. The piano always leads the way, and occasionally has moments of quiet reflection to itself; it’s a true concerto, but a quirky and never-predictable one. In many ways, the orchestral pieces are more straightforward – transcriptions of the first four of the studies, Traumlied, Sturm, Arabeske and Ende – but the orchestral versions are generally longer, following through musical implications that the original pieces could not. The whole disc coheres like that, in an unusual and genuinely surprising way.