Felled by rheumatic fever just five days short of his 30th birthday, Trondheim-born Arvid Kleven (1899-1929) played flute from the age of 19 with the Kristiana Philharmonic Society (the present day Oslo PO) and was almost entirely self-taught as a composer. He created quite a stir in his homeland with his seductive Lotusland, premiered in the spring of 1922. The title alone promises – and, fascinatingly, delivers – a kinship with Cyril Scott, and there are plentiful echoes besides of Debussy, Delius, Bax and (another natural talent whose life was cut cruelly short) the German figure Rudi Stephan (1887-1915).

Kleven’s next orchestral effort, The Sleeping Forest (1923), is a bolder statement, with an undercurrent of expressionism that surfaces with a vengeance in the jagged and imposing Symphonic Fantasy (1925 26). While on study leave in Berlin during 1926 27, Kleven wrote his scarcely less uncompromising Sinfonia libera in due parte (of which only the first part survives). Such progressive tendencies were seemingly all too much for the timid Norwegian musical establishment of the day, who so lambasted Kleven that not another note of his output was heard until the present century. Plaudits are also due to the tireless efforts of the composer and bassoonist Robert Rønnes, who reconstructed both the Symphonic Fantasy and Sinfonia libera from surviving manuscript scores and orchestral parts strewn with inaccuracies.

The performances (set down as long ago as 2005) are uniformly top-notch, with Susanna Mälkki eliciting consistently alert and finely honed results from the Stavanger SO (of which she was artistic director prior to her appointment as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain). BIS’s sound is excitingly realistic and wide-ranging to match, and the disc certainly merits the close attention of any reader with a taste for adventure.