Another riveting performance from Paavo Järvi’s army-of generals Estonian Festival Orchestra and another album on which it’s hard to get a real handle or really know what you’re investing for. The suite from Eduard Tubin’s landmark ballet Kratt headlines but that’s only a little over 20 minutes. The rest of the disc, with strings only, celebrates Estonia’s Soviet-era solidarity with Poland.

If the slight raggedness of the programme frustrates then the music-making absolutely thrills. Granted, the three string works complement each other with resonance. Grażyna Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra is as chewy and full of notes as you’d expect from the composer, with the feel of a supercharged concerto grosso. The grain and sinewy muscularity of the EFO strings result in a bristling atmosphere that is hard not to associate with Poland under occupation. There’s a parallel effect in Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre, whose stark structures and wrenching dissonances benefit from the sheer strength of the EFO’s string sections.

Tubin’s own Music for Strings, tethered at each end by chilling passacaglias, is an effective link between the two. It quickly dials up intensity and density, but even at its most polyphonic retains a functional neoclassical clarity that conjures up images of the Endla Theatre in Pärnu, around the corner from the concert hall in Estonia’s resort town where these recordings were made. Exiled in Sweden, Tubin’s pain is felt in the work’s sinking final Adagio.

The technicolour atmosphere of Kratt is entirely different. This suite from the ballet on the Nordic-Baltic myth of the devilish goblin (Estonia’s first ballet, no less) springs into diabolical life with angular treatment of urgent melodies, all mined from Estonian folk sources. It’s easily compared to Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, not least in its use of instrumental soloists to create character, which they absolutely do here (the last movement’s procession of very distinctive moods, including the trenchant ‘Dance of the Exorcists’, is really something). Listening to performances of such high intensity, focus and narrative power as this makes you long for the full EFO to stop bringing us bits and pieces and record some (or all) of Tubin’s symphonies.