The Estonian composer Mihkel Kerem – born in Tallinn in 1981 and a front-desk violinist in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra since 2015 – used the Covid lockdown to produce no fewer than four symphonies, two of them, his Seventh and Eighth, conceived as a contrasting pair. Kerem’s dark and ominous Seventh Symphony, like that of Sibelius, plots a huge sonata-form arch, growing from and back into its opening material. Its soundworld sits somewhere between Sibelius and Schnittke, combining a sense of natural symphonic growth with dramatic twists of kaleidoscopic textural variety. No.8, which also nods to Sibelius’s Seventh by quoting its celebrated trombone theme, is a vast, unhurried accelerando, its three linked movements tapping into the Nordic-Baltic tradition of using the controlled power of the orchestra to suggest the vastness of nature.

‘a highly expressive blend of two parts traditional tonality, one part modernism and one part postmodernism, sounding in the symphony not unlike Shostakovich in ironic mode, though sometimes reminiscent of a contemporary version of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring’ – Byzantion, MusicWeb International (on Vol.1, TOCC0173)