The accordion’s stock as a classical instrument has risen by leaps and bounds in recent years. The success of Piazzolla’s pieces for its near relative, the bandoneon, has done much to lift the whole family of ‘squeezeboxes’ out of the bierkeller and into the concert hall, though players like the great Mogens Ellegaard – Frode Haltli’s erstwhile teacher – had long been persuading Nordic composers (including Nordheim, Holmboe, Aho and Nørgård) to write for the accordion.

From the outset of his solo career, Haltli’s focus has been on contemporary music. The five works presented here are all progressive rather than aggressive in idiom, though the wistful opening of Sørensen’s Looking on Darkness, inspired by Shakespeare’s 27th Sonnet, is as close to diatonicism as any of the pieces manage. Sørensen’s is the most sheerly beautiful piece; Lindberg’s Jeux d’anches is a brilliant and energetic study in motion (the title refers, apparently, to the instrument’s metal keys) and makes all the more impact by virtue of being placed immediately before Asbjørn Schaathun’s rather ponderous concluding Lament.

Schaathun is a name new to me, as are those of PerMagnus Lindborg and Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje. I didn’t much care for Lindborg’s Bombastic SonoSofisms, somewhat thin in content. Ratkje, the only one of these three to have another piece (for wind band) available on CD, seems on the evidence of her gagaku variations for accordion and string quartet, the centrepiece of the programme, altogether more fluent. Perhaps a little long for its own good, it is something of a tour de force and is very well orchestrated for the five instruments. Sound quality is excellent throughout.