Where might the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir head after Berio’s Coro, pondered Gramophone’s review of the ensemble’s last recording (6/20). The answer is back home, with three Norwegian works that approach the art of text-setting in contrasting ways.

Lars Petter Hagen’s Lament chops up and stretches out the poem ‘Father dear’ by the six-year-old EE Cummings, which is what the poem itself does with its own text. The composer puts a distance between the sound of the choir – its spread harmonies heavy with Baltic pain – and a murmuring undertow built of percussion and electronics (at the lowest registers it’s hard to know which you’re hearing). That distance is painful enough given the text but the lament of the title is felt in the space, the void, in between. In the third movement extra harmonic layers are lasered into the vocal stack while the percussion moves above, tapping and jangling. The sense of release is tantalising; as always, this is a composer who can say a lot with a little.

Nils Henrik Asheim’s Muohta won the 2018 Nordic Council Music Prize and was commissioned by the NSC to counterbalance Haydn’s The Creation. Each of its 21 movements describes a word associated with a particular type of snow from the Sámi language – that of Europe’s only surviving indigenous tribe, the reindeer herders who populate the Nordic region’s far north. One of the most remarkable is the very first, ‘ulahat’, referring to a road barely visible under snow. Asheim’s setting trudges on, battling against loss of focus. The best of the movements, like this, are those in which the snow state is ostensibly hardest to capture – sparse flakes of a snowfall (‘čagit’), the solid layers of ice or snow between looser layers (‘gaskageardni’). Asheim manages to make his responses obvious, lucid and evocative, which is why the depictions of sledging and wading beguile a little less. Either way, it’s a remarkable achievement on many levels, not least that of the bigger picture formed from these small mosaics. The final movement refers to an area completely covered by windblown snow (‘njeaggahat’); always able to evoke, the NSC work with the score to sound like a community rapidly disappearing.

I’m not so convinced by the multiple components of Aurora by Arne Norheim, scored for choir with four soloists, percussion and electronics by the doyen of 20th-century Norwegian modernists. The piece sets chunks of Psalm 139 in sung Latin and spoken Hebrew, and the last canto of Dante’s The Divine Comedy in recited Italian. It casts Dante’s narrative as a heavenly reward for the faith of the psalmist but feels postured – at once obvious and sprawling, the gear-changes between the segments awkward. The choir can also flail uncharacteristically, its four soloists not always in sync. In the previous works, it shows that its technique is as much about luminosity, blend and the subtlest tricks of evocation, as its earlier recordings have proved its jaw-dropping tuning and agility.