Over the past few decades Scandinavian composers have made something of a speciality out of composing challenging music for unaccompanied choirs. Their inspiration has come from the outstanding professional choral groups which have emerged, one of the very finest being the Swedish Radio Choir, which was founded back in 1925 but only developed its particular skill in a cappella singing after Eric Ericson was appointed its music director in 1952. His present-day successor is the Dutchman Peter Dijkstra, who has been its chief conductor since 2007.

The disc is by way of a retrospective of Sven-David Sandström as he approaches his 70th birthday and the music ranges from the Agnus Dei of 1981 to A New Song of Love, written in 2009 for the performers who have recorded it here. While there is a very clear and distinct musical voice permeating the whole programme, Sandström has clearly upped the level of vocal expertise he demands of his choirs as the years have gone by. But these Swedish singers take it all in their stride, seeming to find no problem with his incredibly high tessituras for all voices, traditional, rich, romantic harmonies behaving in anything but a traditional way and non-musical vocalisations (such as the weird vocal tremolo in Laudamus te).

Possibly Sandström’s most famous work, his strange but highly effective response to Purcell’s unfinished anthem Hear my prayer, is here, and reveals the only slight weakness in these performances. Dijkstra certainly has driven his singers to a rare state of technical perfection but compared with, say, Simon Halsey’s Berlin Radio Choir on their 2005 Harmonia Mundi disc, the performances come across as cold and impersonal, with Channel Classics’ rather dry recording not helping matters.