Sakari Oramo may have made the first recording of Per Nørgård’s Symphony No 8 with the Vienna Philharmonic – and received a Gramophone Award for his troubles – but the work was dedicated to Oramo’s compatriot John Storgårds, who premiered it in Helsinki in 2012 and conducted a memorable performance at the Barbican with the BBC Symphony Orchestra the following year. This new recording forms a pendant to Storgårds’s series of Nørgård symphony recordings from Oslo on Dacapo.

Sibelius’s Sixth is often cited as a precursor, given the bright playfulness common to both symphonies. I’d draw parallels between the two scores’ kindred relationship to rhythm: how each uses gentle (mostly) but pronounced rhythmic schemes to tease the music onwards. Making that flow sound gravitational is the conductor’s challenge. Not much separates Oramo and Storgårds beyond the sounds of their respective orchestras, though this account from Bergen seems a little less foregrounded and gestural than the Vienna Philharmonic’s, which you might conclude allows the Norwegians to give us a better idea of the symphony’s bigger picture.

What a symphony it is. There is palpable strain in its opening movement (more Sibelius right there, and another facet in which the Bergen orchestra has the edge) and all in all, that very Per-Nørgård-meets-Gustav-Mahler idea that the symphony strives absolutely to contain the world – that the composer is offering us a glimpse of the universe in all its diversity; holding it up for us to see from any angle. When, in the third and final movement, it gets closest to that dizzying state that recalls the glistening fractal expansion of the Second Symphony, the music can only evaporate.

Nørgård’s quasi-double concerto Three Nocturnal Movements (2015) also demonstrates that gravitational pull, albeit in a less comprehensive symphonic context. Some material is reused from the composer’s Viola Concerto but it doesn’t feel like a distillation – the music, again, looks out towards big horizons, expanding and refracting, twisting its shards of colour into new (or seemingly new) constellations and grand polyphonic patterns. Rhythm, again, plays its part: the light-footed third movement proves susceptible to the allure of various dance steps and there’s one of Nørgård’s signature ‘infinite accelerations’, where the basic metre suddenly halves (another trick borrowed from Sibelius). Peter Herresthal and the composer’s friend and champion Jakob Kullberg, who was deeply involved in the composition, play it with conviction here. Lysning (‘Glade’, 2006) is the bonus – a classic Nørgård miniature in which you can hear him exercising muscles both Spectral and Serialist, the by-product being a beautiful study of light and shadows for strings. Is Nørgård the greatest living symphonist? Listen and decide for yourself.