Russian-born and resident in Sweden since 1993, Victoria Borisova-Ollas was a pupil of Nikolai Korndorf. He was the Soviet maverick whose emigration to Vancouver and early death would seem to have stalled the dissemination of his own music. If the name Borisova-Ollas rings a bell it could be because in 1998 she reached the final of Masterprize, a Cool Britannia composing competition criticised for its middle-of-the-road tunefulness and for the fact that she was only placed second. Or perhaps you caught the selection of her orchestral scores released on Phono Suecia in 2008. The coronavirus put paid to last April’s scheduled UK premiere of a violin concerto dedicated to Baiba Skride.

Borisova-Ollas’s 2017 opera based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a bums-on-seats success for Royal Swedish Opera yet the Financial Times called it ‘scarily bad’. The present selection, comprising five purely instrumental pieces composed between 2003 and 2013, is also likely to divide opinion. Captured on home turf in sympathetic surround sound, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra take centre stage throughout.

Three conductors are involved. Andrey Boreyko launches the album with a broadly paced, partly live account of the title-track, Angelus. Written for the Munich Philharmonic and apparently inspired by the city’s many clock towers, it starts with a reassuring, vaguely Celtic theme, Classic FM-consonant and none the worse for that, giving way to only slightly more exploratory episodes of flutter, tintinnabulation and uplift. We go indoors to sample a church organ and take in the sights after dark. This could be a hit: the orchestration at least is spectacular. Boreyko also directs Creation of the Hymn which, having originally been conceived for string quartet, sounds less like a Respighi travelogue. Its variations switch between familiar-sounding (not exclusively tonal) textures and tropes without establishing a truly personal syntax.

Of the two scores allocated to Martyn Brabbins, The Kingdom of Silence, dedicated to Korndorf’s memory, is a musical nightmare framed by magically scored lullaby-ish musical-box material. I was expecting Sakari Oramo to pull things together with Open Ground, presumably a souvenir or precursor of Borisova-Ollas’s multimedia adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Its dance rhythms, big chords and ethereal iridescence take us only so far.

Devotees of physical format will find BIS’s packaging ecologically sound and the annotations authoritative. Definitely worth a punt if you’re looking for gorgeous cinematic sonorities to show off the audio equipment.