Unless one happens to be dealing with Wolfgang Rihm, Kaija Saariaho or Steve Reich, it’s difficult to suppress the surge of scepticism that swiftly accompanies an opening statement on a CD booklet proclaiming the composer in question to be an ‘internationally regarded’ leading figure. Rolf Martinsson – who he? My hastily conducted research yielded very little about him in Grove Music Online (or Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the German-language equivalent). To be fair, the full statement in the booklet notes refers to Martinsson (b1956) as ‘one of Sweden’s leading composers’. However, one struggles to find anything among the four works presented here that will elevate Martinsson’s music beyond national or regional significance.

There is no doubting Martinsson’s gift as an orchestrator. His ability to control, combine and blend instrumental colours imaginatively and creatively is evident throughout. The fanfare-like Opening Sounds, recalling the composer’s earlier concert overture Open Mind, springs into action with bold-as-brass trumpets, busy, scurrying strings and more harp glissandos than you’ll hear in a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie intro. Tour de force, with its thunderous, percussion-heavy opening, is full of raw power and dramatic presence. Martinsson also has a gift for text-setting, as heard in the intensely expressive Into Eternity, which features Lisa Larsson’s impressively haunting soprano voice. And the orchestral song-cycle Ich denke Dein … is bound together through the subtle use of thematic interplay and development. Yet, despite flashes of originality, Martinsson’s music remains for the most part caught in the musical gestures and clichés not so much of the last fin de siècle but of the one that came before it.

One of Martinsson’s teachers, Brian Ferneyhough, would surely qualify as an ‘internationally leading’ figure, yet from the evidence contained on this recording any trace of the English composer’s influence vanished a long time ago. Like many composers of his generation, Martinsson’s rite of passage involved first embracing then expunging the spectre of modernism and atonality; but if the net result is a kind of watered-down neo-Romanticism consisting of three parts John Williams outtakes from Attack of the Clones, to which has been added one part Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, then give me Ferneyhough any day.