Jón Nordal (b1926) was an acolyte of Paul Hindemith, whose visit to Darmstadt in 1957 silenced him for nearly a decade. Adding to his creative crisis, Nordal also got wise to the fact that audiences in Iceland weren’t responding to his existing works, and by the time he picked up his pen again in 1966 he’d changed direction – lightening his music’s polyphony and using 12-note and other serialist techniques less dogmatically.

But this was no lurch to populism or neo-Romanticism. The piece that saw Nordal return to composition was the Adagio, a brittle piece that, like an Icelandic saga, bottles up fierce emotions under its surface. The composer exploits the rootlessness that was a theoretical tenet of atonality even when his music offers a pained, pleading melody.

The latter are examples of Nordal’s lyrical expressionism, but the sense of desolation in the Adagio – of something sketched, like Sibelius’s Fourth – is a mainstay of the composer’s orchestral style and characterises Choralis. There’s a different sort of inertia in Langnætti, the most active and tangible work here, and it seems to me founded on the idea of the pregnant gesture. Nordal proves as introspective as ever.

Leisla, meanwhile, exists in a semi-meditative state that is punctured as elements rise to the surface. It ends with consonance, on a teetering, icy major chord. Epitafion uses an ostinato to create an inexorable tread but the feeling, intriguingly, is of that tread turning in on itself and moving us nowhere; by the end, we sink deeper into the black earth courtesy of evocative low strings. The Iceland Symphony Orchestra offers eloquence, focus and quality solos but this is some of the most unforgivingly desolate music I’ve heard – what you get when an Icelander decides it’s time to broaden his appeal.