Seppo Pohjola (b1965) is one of the most undeservedly underexposed composers alive and one whose music, never incidental, is always striving both technically and spiritually. Alba has already released Pohjola’s first four quartets (recommended) and here we have the next three, dating from 2018 onwards. All are cast in a single movement of around 20 minutes and all get vivid and meticulous performances from the New Helsinki Quartet. No 7, the most recent, is a stern work despite the oompah undertow. It reaches high tensions in its last minutes before burning out into a pizzicato shadow of itself. Its predecessor, No 6, does the same while a passage of alternating upward scales foreshadows its successor’s hovering central plateaux. The composer describes the Sixth Quartet as ‘Beethoven ruggedness with Tchaikovsky sentiment’. About right, but there is no sense of imitation or borrowing here.

I will return most often to Pohjola’s String Quartet No 5. Like much of the Finnish composer’s music, it dares to look into the abyss. Initially it has a fin de siècle sonic quality spiked by a total instability of sound but supported by total security of form. Soon the intense patterns and processes we know from Pohjola’s symphonies emerge, and frantic activity leads to music born more and more of total inspiration until it reaches a sort of exalted plane, and dies out. A remarkable piece.