Mauritz Stiller is credited with discovering Greta Garbo but before he went to Hollywood he directed the first Swedish blockbuster, Song of the Scarlet Flower (Sängen om den eldröda blomman). Stiller had emigrated to Sweden from Finland to avoid conscription into the Russian army, which might explain why he chose a Finnish novel (by Johannes Linnankoski) on which to base his 1919 film and the Finnish composer Armas Järnefelt, then working in Sweden, to score it. Järnefelt’s work is said to be the first full-length original movie score written in the Nordic countries.

The story is Don Juan meets Peer Gynt: the dashing young Oluf woos countless women, sets off on adventures and eventually finds himself confronting his first love, now a desperate prostitute who kills herself shortly after the encounter. That proves an awakening. Oluf returns home to find his parents dead, and successfully persuades Kyllikki – another conquest whose guardians long disapproved of Oluf, though she promised to wait for him – to be his wife.

Järnefelt struggled with the new discipline of cutting his music to fit the picture but, ever the pragmatist, enjoyed the process and was happy with the result. Though one or two excerpts made it into the Nordic concert repertory (the music that accompanies Oluf shooting the rapids and the fight over Kyllikki, both highlights), the full score was lost until the 1980s and is heard in something near its original form in this completion, faithful to the original orchestration, by Jani Kyllönen and Jaakko Kuusisto.

The music is rooted in National Romanticism with flashes of technical brilliance, a good narrative arc, the occasional Wagnerian reference (including loose application of a leitmotif technique) and some dramatic masterstrokes that proved Stiller chose the right man. Accordion, piano and harmonium add atmosphere at strategic points and there are numerous evocative solos, all beautifully played by members of a perky, reactive and highly engaged Gävle Symphony Orchestra. The score is not as bitty as you might think; Järnefelt has ways of enlivening and energising what could be an endless string of folk dances in the film’s first hour. The music he writes to pit the sinful city against the innocent country – the orchestra ticking quietly with threat and tension, peppered with flashes of suspicious sophistication – is of particular interest and the ending, with a rousing homecoming hymn, would have melted even the most stoic Lutheran heart.