Not just another mood disc hung off Baltic longing, tragedy and melancholy, but one whose view of the Baltic encompasses Finland – a kindred spirit to Latvia, Luthiania and Estonia in its orthodox-tinged melancholy but also a country rather obsessed with tango. ‘Nobody quite knows when tango was established in Finland,’ says the blurb. When you hear Toivo Kärki’s Täysikuu spring out of the desolation that is Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina (wondrously played by Maria Martinova), you get a vivid picture of an oppressed people glimpsing the light relief of the Argentinian dance form that they went on to make their own (though with all minor keys, naturally).

At the centre of the disc is Pēteris Vasks’s fragile Little Summer Music, six short movements in which the joy of sunshine is hesitant, veiled – a summer whose revelry dare not speak its name (it was written while Latvia, that country of outdoor summer song, was still under Soviet occupation). That’s preceded by Kalevi Aho’s intricately weaved Lamento for two violas, Erkki-Sven Tüür’s brittle Dedication for cello and piano, Aulis Sallinen’s rhapsodic Introduction and Tango Overture and Zita Bružaitė’s haunting Bangos for solo piano, its repetition of one-bar units creating an unmistakably Baltic sound. The disc opens with Olli Mustonen’s Toccata, which has its own Baltic glances, and ends with a rendition of Sibelius’s Finlandia Hymn in which the tune is played on a musical saw – at once absurd, comic and saddening, like an Aki Kaurismäki film.

Full marks for originality of concept and for execution, which has all this ensemble’s trademark style and communicative nous, and for a fascinating booklet-note by Ivan Moody. But after a few listens, I’m all at sea when it comes to any sort of sonic thread or journey in a musical menu that enters the ear with wild and tenuous contrasts, for all its fascinating theoretic consistencies.