Tauno Marttinen (1912-2008) was born when Finland was still a Russian Imperial Grand Duchy; he died two months short of his 96th birthday. He was prolific, with nine symphonies (BIS recorded two 20 years ago), a dozen concertos, 14 operas, a musical, six ballets and other orchestral, chamber and vocal works to his credit. Nothing if not a pluralist, Marttinen started out in light music and as a tango arranger, before adopting first Romanticism then (in the late 1950s) serialism. Contemporaneously with Rautavaara, he studied with Vogel in Switzerland and the beautifully lyrical Violin Concerto (1962) dates from this time, written as ‘pure 12-tone music’ (sic). The result sounds chromatic harmonically rather than dodecaphonic and Philippe Graffin finds its expressive heart with ease. More closely recorded than was Pekka Kauppinen by BIS, Graffin and Rasilainen in Turku are also slightly swifter overall, too, and with Cobra’s more immediate sound are marginally the first choice.

Two years after the Violin Concerto, Marttinen penned the first of his four piano concertos, as an early post-modernist reaction away from Schoenbergian expressionism. The trouble with this Concerto classico is that it sounds like cod-Rachmaninovian pastiche, regressing from the radical by diving headlong into old habits. Ralph van Raat does what he can, but modernism obviously drew the best from this composer. The darkly impressive Phantasy (begun the same year but completed only in 1978) lay undiscovered until after Marttinen’s death. Stylistically, it lies between the two concertos and Marko Ylönen makes a fine case for it, despite his intonation being audibly taxed in the central Adagio, accompanied with finesse by Hannu Lintu and the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra. This is a fascinating, entertaining release, well documented and worth investigating. Hopefully Cobra will go on to issue some of the symphonies.