In the best of Sebastian Fagerlund’s music there is plenty of interest (and importance) happening beneath a lucid surface. Structurally, the composer’s flute concerto Terral (the word referencing both rootedness and a southern European wind) is an advance on its predecessor for cello and orchestra, Nomade (9/21). Schemes and systems push inexorably towards mini-events (a moment of ecstasy in the first movement; the furious burn-out of the finale) even as the discourse feels both freighted with the composer’s distinctive cold grandeur and imbued with the sort of expansiveness that apparently offers the soloist all the space in the world. The latter is never more apparent than in Sharon Bezaly’s eloquently played final cadenza, though here her own ‘freedom’ is resonantly tethered by a single held note from within the orchestra.

Tonality is more to the fore here than we might be used to from this composer but it is always kept in check – tugged at and probed – by bigger messages and projects, as in the composer’s opera Autumn Sonata that preceded it (11/18) and immediately followed Strings to the Bone. This is a quasi-shamanistic score whose bound-up energies pulsate as if just underneath the surface sheen of the string ensemble.

Autumn Sonata is most apparent in Fagerlund’s almost-contemporaneous Chamber Symphony, where a brooding opening Largo presents material that will come home to roost in faster, more angst-ridden circumstances (what makes the opera so utterly captivating). This piece is all long-breathed lyricism dredging up stuff that has to be worked through, but here with an almost American minimalist insistence that slow, gradual coming-to-terms is the best way (the opposite happens in the opera, hence the drama).

Perhaps the tempos and density (though not intensity) of the music also glance in the direction of the Icelandic school. Certainly, the clear recording of John Storgårds’s on-point Tapiola Sinfonietta lets you hear all those structures at work. Some of this music is more studied than that of the composer’s outstanding orchestral trilogy, making for a less ethereal but no less satisfying experience. But new instalments in BIS’s chronicling of this composer’s post-Lindberg aesthetic are always worth acquiring, and this is no exception.