Now into his late 80s, Estonian maestro Neeme Järvi is surely among today’s most prolifically recorded conductors. As well as demonstrating abundant flair in the French late-Romantic and post-Romantic repertoire, he has been a consistent champion of music from the Nordic and Baltic regions. The latest addition to his voluminous discography on the Chandos label is taken from a live concert in Gothenburg, Sweden, on 11 October 2024 in the presence of an impeccably behaved audience. It couples Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s 1972 Cantus arcticus for orchestra and taped birdsong (one of his most frequently recorded works) with two relative rarities by one of the fathers of Swedish musical nationalism at the turn of the last century, Hugo Alfvén.

The disc opens with Festspel, op.25 (1907), composed for the 1908 inauguration of the art nouveau building of Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre. It takes as its inspiration the Polish exploits of ‘King Karl’s Men’, a band of soldiers commanded by the early-18th-century monarch Karl XII. It opens with rousing brass fanfares before breaking into a magnificently poised and jubilant polonaise for full orchestra, redolent of Liadov at his most imposing. Alfvén’s sure command of orchestral sonorities is even more evident in the elegant trio section, which combines rococo grace à la Tchaikovsky with such delightful details as burbling bassoons and flutes. This is the sort of music at which Järvi has long excelled, and it makes a splendid curtain-raiser for the album as a whole.

The other Alfvén work is the substantial eight-movement Suite taken from his music to Ludvig Nordström’s play Gustav II Adolf, celebrating the 300th anniversary of the death of another Swedish king at the Battle of Lützen during the Thirty Years’ War. In fact, Alfvén took greater inspiration from Carl Gustav Grimberg’s more colourful account of Gustav II Adolf’s exploits in his epic chronicle The Wonderful Destiny of the Swedish People. The opening movement, Vision, is an atmospheric setting of the Lutheran chorale ‘Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott’, followed by a gripping Intermezzo with nicely worked-out fugal episodes in the strings. Sweden’s main adversary, Emperor Ferdinand II, is depicted in his imperial chapel in the evocative third movement, which combines prayerful intimacy with moments of grandeur, its many imaginative touches of orchestration including a tinkling celesta and brooding cello solo. Then come three character pieces in neo-Baroque style: a graceful Sarabanda for strings, a boozily bucolic Bourrée for a trio of bassoons, and a ceremonial Menuett for full orchestra. A soulful, introspective Elegi (often excerpted from the Suite) precedes the final movement, an extended depiction of the 1632 Battle of Breitenfeld which features another chorale tune. Once again, Järvi and his Gothenburg forces rise majestically to the occasion.

Bookended between these two Alfvén pieces are the very different delights of Rautavaara’s Cantus arcticus, a series of three tableaux composed to mark the first doctoral graduation ceremony of the University of Oulu in northern Finland. By opting to focus on the region’s natural environment rather than paying more obvious homage to institutional history, Rautavaara took on the mantle of Sibelius at a time when he was embracing a more tonal idiom. Yet the work is perhaps more akin to a meeting between Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia antartica and Respighi’s The Birds, albeit with the addition of post-modernist sophistication in the way it layers the orchestral scoring, and the orchestra against the taped birdsong. From the entwined flute arabesques of the opening to the gradually burgeoning sonorities that are unlocked by the first twitterings of ‘The Bog’, with its carefully deployed wind dissonances, the first movement draws the listener steadily into this distinctive soundworld.

The second movement, ‘Melancholy’, combines haunting whoops from the birds with affectingly fragile string textures of a glacial Sibelian quality, superbly shaded by the Gothenburg players under Järvi’s sensitive coaxing. ‘Swans migrating’ are the subject of the closing movement, their distant calls gradually melding into a more densely scored version of the first movement’s arabesques. This is the most beguiling music of the triptych, the balances finely judged, the music slow-moving but inexorable. Producer Lars Nilsson and sound engineer Michael Dahlvid deliver a vivid recording in state-of-the-art surround sound, making this an outstanding version among those in the current catalogue. There are detailed booklet notes by Daniel M. Grimley, and this unlikely but effective (and superbly-played!) pairing of Alfvén and Rautavaara will be self-recommending to Järvi’s many admirers.