During the late 1950s and early ’60s when these pieces were composed, Ingvar Lidholm was head of chamber music at the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation, writing music in his spare time. Approaching his forties, he had already engaged with Hindemithian neo-classicism and luminaries of the post-war European avant-garde. As with those figures, it is the tension between the cerebral and the poetic that gives his music its energy and impact.

Mutanza conjures itself out of silence, through unpitched, then pitched, percussion to music in toughest Schoenbergian serial-expressionist style, still haunted by shades of its noise-based origins. This manner may currently be out of fashion, but its essential paradox – of alienated communication – remains gripping, especially when delivered with what sounds like real fervour by the Norrköping orchestra under their principal conductor.

Much the same could be said of the two movements Lidholm has recently extracted and re-scored from his prize-winning cantata Night of the Poet, the second of these setting an archetypally Swedish introverted poem by Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (and beautifully sung by Lena Nordin). Motus-colores pursues and impressively fulfils its aim of conjuring a coherent and transparent pointillism from its expanded chamber orchestra resources.

The largest piece on the disc is the six-movement ballet Riter, a kind of latter-day, urbanised Rite of Spring, which confronts the current year’s sacrificial victim with the previous year’s. The score is a polystylistic assemblage, with a musique concréte movement and some shades, I fancy, of Henze’s near-contemporary König Hirsch. Hardly an epoch-making score, Riter is nevertheless far too well composed to be allowed to gather dust. In fact, the whole of this superbly played and recorded disc is a welcome reminder of the work of one of Sweden’s most rewarding living composers.