A comprehensive compendium of music drawn from Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala, would run to many discs (see 6/13 for a Specialist’s Guide to Kalevala music), so it’s frustrating that this conscientious 70-minute release contains two essential works and two forgettable curiosities. Sibelius’s tinkering only ever made his music better, tighter and more inevitable, so the 1897 version of Lemminkäinen in Tuonela captured here is really only for those who know the published version well enough to be able to put the composer’s first thoughts in context.

In his first Sibelius recording with his erstwhile Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Dima Slobodeniouk capitalises on that etched, articulate style the orchestra brings to its pet composer, even if the Sibelius can feel over-emphatic. Perhaps that’s the unrevised score as much as the performance.

That same quality pays dividends in the album’s main event, Uuno Klami’s five movement Kalevala Suite (1940). This is music a long way from Sibelius, with the influence of Stravinsky and primitivism laid bare, even if there are nods to Finnish syntax in the repeated-note melody of ‘The Forging of the Sampo’ and to Sibelius in the low-slung cor anglais tune of ‘Cradle Song for Lemminkäinen’. Otherwise it’s all machined percussion, bright colours and citric harmonies, with the aforementioned ‘Sampo’ movement sounding nearer to Villa-Lobos (much like Kalevi Aho’s Symphonic Dances, out of interest) than the villa Ainola.

Slobodeniouk’s performance is more overtly brutalist than John Storgårds’s account with the Helsinki Philharmonic, who also offer the closest rival version of Leevi Madetoja’s thrilling orchestral tone poem Kullervo of 1913, a piece that has always led me to imagine a Finnish Zemlinsky. Storgårds’s HPO are plusher but Slobodeniouk’s Lahti SO more forensic. Either way, you need Madetoja’s piece, and Klami’s, in your library.

The most intriguing prospect here is Tauno Pylkkänen’s Kullervo Goes to War (1942). The composer was orphaned during the Finnish civil war and then forced to hide his homosexuality, though his homeland’s cultural history would suggest he could easily have graduated to advanced alcoholism (as he did) without either of those prompts. Pylkkänen wrote the score at 24 but, on auditioning, it has little of the individuality that would mark out his many operas that followed. Once again, it’s just a little lumpy, however fine a case these musicians make for it.