‘Recurrence’, ‘Concurrence’ (3/20) and now ‘Occurrence’. The Iceland Symphony Orchestra’s three-disc survey of new orchestral music from its homeland has reached its end point and it’s easy to conclude that no country on earth has reinvented the language of the symphony orchestra on such distinctive and locally relevant terms as this one.

So much so that a Canadian such as Veronique Vaka can fall for Iceland and cook up a piece like Lendh, an extraordinary canvas with an umbilical connection to the landscape of the place. The piece, nominated for the 2020 Nordic Council Music Prize, is based on analyses of steam and rock features around Krýsuvík subsequently converted into musical notation. It opens with the tectonic thwack-creak fast becoming a hallmark of Nordic orchestral scores before emerging into a luminous, subtle, carefully formed and exquisitely detailed piece that floats as one ever-transforming entity, pulsating with micro-pressures and glistening details, unfolding organically with spectral-level colour-matching. Pedal notes on lur-like brass are pulled gently and microtonally out of line – the world seen at its most precarious and extreme. Lendh is a marvel.

Vaka’s music clearly bears a relationship to that of Anna Thorvaldsdottir, which was featured on ‘Recurrence’ and ‘Concurrence’. The latter album included Haukur Tómasson’s Piano Concerto. The same composer’s In Seventh Heaven has similar rhythmic snap and crackle in contrast to the slow-moving landscapes of Icelandic fashion. It is full of ear-catching orchestration, as raw and unconventional as Jón Leifs’s, ulterior harmonies tugging while colours shift as rapidly as the Icelandic weather above. The orchestra’s handling of the exposed passages for high strings and characterised woodwind-writing demonstrate technically how far it has come in the past decade alone.

Flow and Fusion by Thurídur Jónsdóttir was a highlight of ‘Recurrence’ and here we have her flute concerto Flutter, which features sampled insect noises and other electronics, including a promotion of the ubiquitous Nordic pedal note to a general hum. It is an exploration of flute and breath noises not unlike Björk’s or Saariaho’s but a little more focused. Structurally it feels like a road movie – a journey through textural landscapes more than anything developmental.

Conductor Daníel Bjarnason, a driving force behind the project whose Emergence featured on ‘Recurrence’, opens with his own Violin Concerto, first heard at the Royal Festival Hall in 2017. It has dedicatee Pekka Kuusisto’s puckish spirit all over it, from the infectious soloist whistling (used to moving effect when it returns late on as the violin’s sole accompanist) to the grunge-improvisatory elements and clear-cut, eye-moistening tune. There is microtonal colour but it’s probably the least ‘Icelandic-sounding’ piece here, filled instead with Bjarnason’s dramatic instinct for setting up structural schemes that come home to roost and his Bartók-like rhythmic counterpoint.

As an appendix we hear from a dead composer, Iceland’s great 12-tone pioneer Magnús Blöndal Jóhannsson (1938-2005). His Adagio for strings and percussion of 1980 marked a shift in style following the death of his wife and a battle with the bottle. Forget Samuel Barber. This is a bleak, translucent elegy that places unison sheets of wannabe-lyrical string melody over held pedal notes and drones, ending with a sudden rush of air as the last pedal falls away. A quizzical gesture to wrap up an outstanding and historic series, one that affects the mind as much as the ears.