One soloist, one orchestra. It sounds so simple. Yet as this excellent recording demonstrates, the concerto form is one still full of possibility and creative challenge for composers and performers alike today. In works by Per Nørgård and Kaija Saariaho, Danish cellist Jakob Kullberg takes us into fascinating sound-worlds, drawing on a broad range of extended techniques.

Between is Nørgård’s first cello concerto, written in 1985, with three titled movements suggesting, as the Danish composer writes, an aspect of the relationship between soloist and orchestra. They do battle throughout In Between, a thorny movement with virtuosic demands that are more than met by Kullberg, the BBC Philharmonic and conductor Michael Francis. The balance of power shifts in the brief central Turning Point, whose uneasy beauty anchors the work, and the journey ends in Among, where a balance between cello and orchestra finally struck.

Kullberg steps into the creative process for Remembering Child, a 1986 homage to a teenage anti-nuclear activist who died tragically young. Originally written for viola, the cellist...