Despite Detlev Glanert’s self-professed feeling for the melancholia and severity of north German music (he was born in Hamburg), his imposing, sit-up-and-listen orchestral style doesn’t, to my ears, have a great deal to do with Brahms’s. But that doesn’t render Glanert’s responses to Brahms’s music any less interesting.

The composer’s arrangement of Brahms’s Four Serious Songs consists of the songs themselves – structurally unchanged but orchestrated – embedded into a continuous orchestral flow encompassing four preludes and an epilogue. Glanert knows his Brahms (note the way he deploys low winds and horns in the songs) but the piece is entirely new given the tendency towards technicoloured angst that comes in the orchestral preludes, each induced by the final bars of the songs that precede them. The effect is akin to that of Brahms’s songs bobbing up in a strange dream, where the more troubling, fantastical surrounding elements nevertheless share their DNA.

An advancing of that idea is heard in Glanert’s ‘vision’ of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, Weites Land. Here, too, Glanert’s knowledge of Brahms (modulation, instrument deployment) is apparent but it comes at a price if you’re a fan of Glanert himself. Without much of a residue of its own, this piece needs to be heard as a prelude to the symphony – as commissioned.

But it serves a purpose in this programme, which ends with Luciano Berio’s orchestration of Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata No 1. As Guy Rickards’s note suggests, Berio believed orchestral clothing transformed the sonata into a concerto. If so, it would be Brahms’s weakest by some margin. Sometimes the Brahmsian lilt is inhibited (Berio cramming in too much inner movement); at others it’s nailed.

It pains me to moan about such fine musicians but the Helsinki Philharmonic, with their delicate, tight string sound, are never going to conjure up Brahmsian depth; and, for all his dexterity, Kari Kriikku can lack the sense of autumnal glow the music suggests. Ditto Michael Nagy, whose tone and delivery are highly attractive but unerringly narrow. In summary, a frustrated gem.