Finlandia, Chandos and Alba in the 1990s helped make Madetoja’s music familiar. One of the early successes was the splendid short suite from his pantomime-ballet Okon Fuoko and a primary attraction of this new issue is Arvo Volmer’s further eight-movement extract (he has recorded the work in full for Alba). Running to just over 21 minutes, this Second Suite is pure Madetoja, a pithy, characterful work full of attractive music.

So, too, is the vocal suite Autumn (1930, orchestrated 1940), settings of his wife’s poems. The six songs are thematically linked but arranged as irregular pairs: Nos 1 (‘Autumn’) and 4 (‘Goodnight’), 2 (‘Farewell’) and 6 (‘O’er the waves eternal’), and 3 (‘You thought I was watching you’) and 5 (‘Oh, blue bird’). There is some delightful vocal writing here, which soprano Kirsi Tiihonen relishes, and in Väinämöinen Sows the Wilderness, his atmospheric 1919 fantasia based on part of Canto 2 of the Kalevala. There is more than a touch of Luonnotar about this cantata for soprano or tenor (here the firm-voiced Tuomas Katajala), not least in its expressive restraint.

The Kullervo Overture and Little Suite are earlier, pre-Great War pieces. The suite is almost light music but in Kullervo one can hear how the apprentice composer is gradually sucked into Sibelius’s orbit, so that by its powerful coda one wonders whether Madetoja has assimilated the style or the style has assimilated the composer. The Oulu SO respond enthusiastically to what must still be largely unfamiliar territory even to them and their playing is matched by very good sound.