Having already championed the music of Veljo Tormis (b1930) on her debut disc for Finlandia (8/02), Anu Tali now turns her attention to another fellow Estonian, Erkki-Sven Tüür. Composed in 1993 for the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, Action Passion Illusion for strings comprises a readily assimilated 17-minute triptych with echoes of Pärt, Vasks and even Bernard Herrmann (to my ears, the dynamic opening movement seems to acknowledge the ‘Prelude’ to Psycho). Tali draws splendidly stylish and committed playing from the orchestra she helped found in 1997 with her identical twin, Kadri.

Zeitraum (1992) proves a rather more intractable beast, a 12-and-a-half-minute orchestral essay which chimes with Tüür’s self-avowed preoccupation (as quoted in the helpful booklet) with ‘a combination of opposites – tonality versus atonality, regular repetitive rhythms versus irregular complex rhythms, tranquil meditativeness versus explosive theatricality – and especially in the way they gradually change from one to another’. Admittedly, Tali’s lucid conception lends the work greater cogency than Paavo Järvi’s more spacious view on Virgin, but I’m still not entirely won over.

Both Tüür offerings frame Sibelius’s 1894 melodrama The Wood-Nymph, a setting of the Swedish poet Viktor Rydberg for speaker, two horns, piano and strings. It’s an enjoyably moody affair, whose haunting Largamente final section in particular looks forward to the first of the four Lemminkäinen Legends. Tali’s performance is just as convincing as Vänskä’s pioneering BIS account, though it’s a pity that Lasse Pöysti’s vividly characterised narration wasn’t more tastefully integrated into the over- all sound picture (he was recorded separately and looms slightly too large for comfort). The disc concludes with Rachmaninov’s Three Russian Songs for chorus and orchestra of 1926, whose tugging nostalgia is potently conveyed here (the excellent choir hails from Estonia’s neighbour, Latvia).

Overall, an enterprising (if none too generous) anthology, very decently engineered and well worth investigating if you fancy the unusual programme.