Svetlana Boym described nostalgia as ‘a romance with one’s own fantasy’ – pertinent words in the case of Norway, a country that modernised before it had a chance to mature. Norwegian composers have long played with their country’s obsession with identity and tradition but few do so with the combination of style, beauty, humour and sincerity of Lars Petter Hagen. Even when teasing the whole predicament of Norway’s phantom burdens of history (short) and tradition (often constructed), he manages to tell you how important those things are to him, to Norwegians, to all of us.

Much of the music here constitutes a romance with a fantasy. All of it refracts music of the past: Nordraak’s Funeral March for Edvard Grieg, Pauline Hall’s folk-song arrangements and music by Strauss, Mahler, Berg, Bruckner and Schoenberg. The ‘harmonium repertoire’ of the title track consists of harmonium parts from orchestral scores by the latter five sprung from their original contexts, filtered as if through faltering memory. The strings accompanying an Indian harmonium (made in Southall, London) yearn to tell of what’s missing – to fill in gaps or sing a full phrase – but are stopped short. Grand yet teasingly quiet chords at the end of the second movement suggest a big resolution, a transcendence, happening somewhere out of vision. The dark, reedy tones of the fourth movement eventually give way to a sampled funeral march to create distance (an old trick Grieg used to pull using more analogue techniques). Everywhere, stalking darkness prevents the music from ever getting too comfy.

Three Transfigurations consists of fantasy recollections of Richard Strauss (a composer who had real reasons to lament lost traditions) – controlled, eloquent miniatures for strings and harmonium rooted in simple but resonant diatonic harmonies. Funeral March for Edvard Grieg replaces the inflated grandeur of Nordraak’s original with something entirely different and not devoid of optimism. Microtonal techniques and a garland of fluorescent electronic colours pull it into the ‘now’, just as, strangely, Pauline Hall’s tonally drifting piano, now in Hagen’s possession and tenderly played here by Kenneth Karlsson, does her own folk-song arrangements.

Before he was fully at ease with his own gentle, smiling provocation, Hagen had his work Passage (2000) performed under a pseudonym. The work was inspired by Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin but written in Edvard Munch’s seaside house at Warnemünde, where the composer responded strongly to being alone in an isolated, summer seaside resort in the depths of winter. Accordingly, Passage is an emotionally intense piece concerned with memory but also with the space and light of architecture and the sharply cut scars and gashes of Libeskind’s building (and something of its zig-zag form). All is straight and angled, but for curving cello glissandos; we’re in a hesitant, contemplative world until the final movement’s bid for escape. Tenderly performed, it’s a handsome way of using the past to overcome the present.