Gabriel Suovanen suggested Lars Karlsson (b1953) write a song-cycle for him when the two men ran into one another at a Helsinki tram stop. And just as the history of Nordic music is criss-crossed with incidents relating to trams, so Karlsson’s cycle is very much rooted in the song tradition of Oskar Merikanto, Leevi Madetoja and Toivo Kuula. Expressionist texts by the Swedish Nobel laureate Pär Lagerkvist, filled with nature metaphors and charting a journey from the existential angst of youth to the contemplative acceptance of death, only reinforce the idea.

But there’s a vital difference between being rooted in a tradition and immersing yourself in it, which is where I find Karlsson’s Seven Songs troubling. There’s nothing wrong with writing in a tonal idiom per se, of course, but to my ears Karlsson doesn’t sufficiently add to, refract or reimagine the tonal language of the 19th and early 20th centuries or the shape and formulas of its melodies. The sharp-witted Lapland Chamber Orchestra never fail to highlight the sudden evocation of text Karlsson embeds in the band but the net effect is that it winds up sounding obvious and passé even underneath Suovanen’s open-hearted singing. The tremolo strings in III, the horn solo in IV – all highly evocative but you get the feeling you’ve heard it many times before.

Karlsson originally intended to write an overtly Nordic clarinet concerto based on the idea of something shamanistic – a quality of Christoffer Sundqvist’s beguiling playing if ever there was one. That idea was scrapped in favour of an ultra-traditional concerto built upon the intervals of the fourth and fifth. Sundqvist’s account is sensitive and intelligent; the orchestra is supple and spacious in the ‘Valse triste’ central movement and digs into Karlsson’s building tensions in the finale. There is impressive clarity in the handling of the work’s motifs and in its wider journey. There is very little wrong with it, in fact. But there is even less distinctive or bold about it.