Listen blind to Kalevi Aho’s String Quartet No 1 and you might presume you were hearing some lost neoclassical Grieg, some unknown Kraus or Berwald. The music is cast-iron in formal strength but a little naive, as Aho all but acknowledges in the booklet, as does BIS by placing it last on this disc of the composer’s first three quartets, dating respectively from 1967, 1970 and 1971. The First Quartet’s opening Theme and Variations may be laboured but it shows the breadth of what the fine Stenhammar Quartet can do with colour and articulation – an air of courtly dance music hanging over its conservative tonal style, before it ends on a stern chorale.

Aho’s style may have evolved but it hasn’t necessarily become more distinct or gained the mark of a singular voice. The composer’s three-movement String Quartet No 2 was his breakthrough work and, as in its successor, the image of Shostakovich looms large over sound and structure. Each of the four movements is a fugue. Themes are well worked and there’s expanse in the central Presto that winds up and down. Beware some noises off from one of the players here.

Aho’s Third Quartet is the best of these early three and the most unusual, cast appealingly symmetrically in eight short continuous movements that cross-reference one another. It brims with interesting devices right from the first of them, when an engaging theme emerges, tracked by an evocative parallel. There are no wasted notes and the music is heartfelt (not a given with Aho), with a sincerity of expression that can almost (but not quite) knock that overbearing Shostakovich influence out of the picture. Fine performances and sound, but those, like me, still yearning to be persuaded that Aho really only sounds like Aho won’t find a great deal of reassurance here.