Some readers will have more experience of Estonia than I do, but fresh from a first exploration of Tallinn and the Lohusalu peninsula I was struck by the area’s juxtaposition of ice-white Nordic modernity with the medieval. This recording, made live at Tallinn’s angular, modernist (and white) Methodist Church, would suggest Tõnu Kõrvits’s music has that same combination at its heart.

Kõrvits draws extensively on Estonian folk melodies and much of his writing is shaded by Estonia’s recent choral prowess, which itself has roots in the country’s long tradition of massed singing. From the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and others, we now recognise the sound as a professional one: blend that hardly distinguishes between male and female voices; an ease with extremes of volume; and a rich, sonorous delivery that’s a choral cousin of Leopold Stokowski’s ‘free-bowing’ principle. Kõrvits’s choral works are built on these things, and on that typically Estonian keening atmosphere, potent modality, deep history and present pain. Maybe, in Laul (‘Song’) for cello and strings, there’s a dalliance with the dancing melancholy of Latin America.

Those Estonian elements are evidenced in Reflections from a Plain, Kõrvits’s fantasy on a song by Veljo Tormis, for choir and cello. A string orchestra joins that mix for Seven Dreams of Seven Birds, formally satisfying miniatures in which choral clustering and intoning is punctuated by an avian cello, happy to peck at its own feathers and feet. I found Kõrvits’s seven Labyrinths, essentially harmonic studies, brilliant at their best but occasionally too exercise-like. Kõrvits patterns and layers where he can, never more effectively than in the gothic oar-strokes of The Last Ship. ECM applies its trademark vaseline to the lens, perhaps a little too much for Kõrvits’s take on Tormis’s Plainland Song, in which the composer accompanies vocalist Kadri Voorand on the kannel, Estonia’s contribution to the Baltic psaltery family.