Djuro Živković, born in Serbia in 1975 but long resident in Sweden, has had a meteoric career, the most visible symbol of which was his winning of the Grawemeyer Prize in 2014. His musical language is of great sophistication and often very virtuosic, essentially modernist, but his principal inspiration is the spirituality of the Orthodox Church and in particular the writings in the collection known as the Phikokalia, which means ‘love of the beautiful’ (‘kindness’, as the booklet note has it, is a stretch, though in Christian terms a result of a love of beauty should indeed be kindness). Živković does not shy away in his work from illustrating the complex journey to attain that love.

Indeed, Citadel of Love (2019 20) is a massively dramatic work, making full use of extended performance techniques to conjure up auditory and spiritual landscapes of both transcendent beauty and challenging vigour. The use of percussion, including anvil, in the second movement, suggests the monastic summoning to prayer of the rhythmic beating of the semantron, while the theremin employed in the third evokes a slightly lunatic but infectious joy. The finale inevitably brings the work back to contemplation, but again it is a journey, not merely stasis.

The other works on this magnificently performed disc are I Shall Contemplate … II (2011) and Night Music (2014). The former does indeed deal in stasis, as its title would suggest, but one could legitimately suppose it to be a literal statement of intent, rather than an actualisation of contemplation, since there is once again that sense of moving from one state to another. Night Music is quite a different proposition, a kind of brief fantasy on six pieces by Scriabin, in which Živković adds his own dreamlike commentaries to the Russian composer’s music. It may sound like an odd idea, but the end result is often beguilingly beautiful.

Norbotten NEO provide absolutely outstanding performances, doing full justice to this remarkable music, and the recording quality is everything one has come to expect from BIS.