Dance is Anna Clyne’s hugely impressive new cello concerto, written for the New York-based cellist Inbal Segev and first performed last year. Both the title and inspiration come from a poem by the 13th-century Persian writer and mystic Rumi; the word “Dance” begins each of its five lines, and Clyne takes the remainder of each of the lines as the titles for the concerto’s five movements.

That produces a musical scheme that is predominantly slow and reflective. There are moments in the first movement, called “…when you’re broken open”, which recall John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil, as consoling, modal string chords underpin the soaring cello line, just as the rough motoric energy of the opening of the second movement, “…if you’ve torn the bandage off”, seems to feed off the “industrial” minimalism of Clyne’s teacher, the Bang on a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe. But none of it seems derivative and the concerto as a whole is utterly personal, blending musical materials in a way that is entirely Clyne’s own. Sometimes she borrows from folk music – she particularly singles out Jewish and Irish echoes in her melodic writing – and sometimes from classical models, especially baroque, but the fusion is always gorgeously rich and compelling.

Dance is the most impressive piece by Clyne that I’ve heard, and it’s an achievement for any new cello work to overshadow Elgar’s concerto, with which it’s paired here. That’s partly because of the intensity of every musical idea in Clyne’s work, all vividly projected by Segev, but also perhaps because her performance of the Elgar isn’t as full blooded as one would like, never really taking command of the piece or plumbing its expressive depths as much as it could. Though very accomplished, it’s too cautious for my taste. But while there are more convincing performances of the Elgar available on disc, Dance is worth seeking out for its own sake.

This week’s other pick

Betsy Jolas’s Side Roads is a cello concerto, too. Written for Anssi Karttunen, and originally intended as a miniature to be played alongside pieces by Takemitsu and Lutosławski, it grew into a beautifully crafted 20-minute movement, in which the solo cello gradually draws the accompanying string orchestra into a sparky exchange of musical ideas, which regularly veers off in new directions. In this live recording from the Orchestre National d’Auvergne, conducted by Roberto Forés Veses (21 Music, digital download only), it’s followed by the Prélude Symphonique for strings by the organist-composer Thierry Escaich, a perfectly efficient if unremarkable piece of post-Bartókian string writing.