Outi Tarkiainen is a composer of rare moral conviction and geographical attachment, with a longing for the far north that once saw her move to Ivalo in Arctic Finland (while there, she wrote her 2019 Proms commission, Midnight Sun Variations). Her music is filled with longing and latent anger, much of the latter stemming from her sympathy with the plight of the Sámi, the reindeer herding communities of northern Norway, Sweden and Finland that form Europe’s only surviving indigenous tribe. The Earth, Spring’s Daughter is the world’s first notated song-cycle setting the Sámi language, using assorted poets chosen by the composer. There are shades of Kaija Saariaho, Aulis Sallinen and Alban Berg (a big inspiration) in her music but Tarkiainen is her own person.

And this score is her magnum opus to date – a monodrama that rails against the oppression of the Sámi and the plundering of the universe with varying degrees of politeness, while forming a symmetrical cycle reflecting the Sámi belief in continuous renewal. The title also hints at a Sámi creation myth, spoken in the Prologue before being sung (and extended) in a powerful epilogue, which feels newly distant. Before that, following songs of pain, longing and fleeting beauty, the mezzo-soprano becomes one with the earth; the music is sucked up into a vortex and thwacking chords echo the final transmigration of the soul into nature, à la Sibelius’s Fifth. The whole piece is an acute response to text but the vocal writing never tries to be novel and the music always speaks of more than its immediate subject. Räisänen sings it with feeling but reserves real differentiation of colour for the prologue and epilogue.

The saxophone concerto Saivo also takes its inspiration from Sámi culture. The title refers to the tribe’s sacred places generally but also specifically: the mythical double-bottomed lake underneath which an inverse reality lies. The sense is of a ritual and the invocation of natural phenomena, which works well with the saxophone’s vernacular sound (it can also conjure up the spirit of the yoik, the Sámi’s traditional prayer-like song). We feel the instrument’s almost animalistic vulnerability acutely: crying and wailing in the third movement before being forced on to a ledge; sucked into another frenzied vortex in the last movement, blowing in an improvised frenzy in the process. It is a bold and powerful moment – wonderfully realised by Perko – but there’s plenty of tenderness and depth elsewhere, as well as a telling feeling that we’re only hearing the half of it. Storgårds and his Lapland orchestra play this music like they own it – which, in some ways, they do.