This collection comprises a number of Veljo Tormis’s choral pieces, as one might expect, but the central work is the cycle Reminiscentiae, choral settings arranged for string orchestra. This gives them a very different atmosphere from their vocal originals, since they no longer depend on the text as a springboard for the musical narratives but instead give the appearance of greater abstraction, at least if one ignores the poetic titles still given in the accompanying booklet. And this is proof of the composer’s mastery of musical structure and textural variety, for there is not a single piece in this unpredictable cycle that seems compromised by the absence of text.

Of the texted works here, I find the most impressive to be Hamlet’s Song, exploring the eponymous Shakespearean figure’s state of mind in a highly original way, and The Tower Bell in My Village, a setting of Pessoa whose musical depiction, at once simple and complex, of the intertwining of the melancholy of life with the solitary tolling of the bell makes me wonder how it would sound in the original Portuguese. A provocative album containing carefully planned reminiscences of a true original.